 going. Here we go. You ready? I start with a quote from Wikipedia. During its debut weekend in the United States, the film opened at number one, grossing an estimated $23 million in 2,771 theaters. In its second weekend it was number one again dropping only 31 percent breaking in sections 32 percent record as the smallest second weekend drop for any number one movie of 2010. As of October 31st 2010 the film has grossed $79.7 million in the United States and 32.2 million overseas for a worldwide total of $132.9 million. The movie is of course the social network. The number one movie of 2010 is about a programmer. Occasionally I hear people bitching about this trend of hiring rockstar programmers or ninjas. To them I say suck it! Today's real rock stars are washed up stinky wannabes who dream of a world where teenagers rebelled against their oppressive parents. But you know what? The 60s was 50 years ago. The kids won. Look at Justin Bieber. Rock stars are dinosaurs. I want to propose here at RubyConf X in New Orleans, Louisiana that we programmers, you and I, we are the rebels, the upstarks, the dreamers, the believers, the change makers. I want to say in a speech. The writer of the social network Aaron Sorkin is the writer of the West Wing, a show I'm a big fan of. If you know the show I'd like you to imagine Sam Seabourn, Toby Zeigler, slaving away all night in the communications department to write this speech for me. Drinking lattes to keep themselves awake. Imagine I'm President Obama. Only a little bit pastier. I'm with some journalistic tendencies. And imagine he would know what you were talking about if you asked him about optimizing for functions that call themselves. Imagine he cared deeply as much as you do that you can pass blocks of code about his values. Imagine he wakes up in the middle of the night and thinks, yes, I have a theater to do everything. An asynchronous event loop. Got it? I think we're ready to start. My goal for this talk is no slides. That's my presidential address. My goal for this talk is not to teach you how to start a successful business. Tom Preston Warner did a much better job of that than I can. He just spoke right here a minute ago. Also, I'm still on this road myself. I've chosen to go it alone. I've chosen to build products and to fund it whatever way I can. In my case, simply consulting and using the projects I do to learn new things, write open source code and figure out my next big idea. My goal more is to fill you with a sense of wonder, a sense of holy shit, a sense of, hey, this just might be for me. And if nothing else, I'd like to leave you with a spring in your step. I don't have any big company insight. I don't have a whole lot of success to draw on myself. So instead, I took to interviews of a few key players in the Ruby community to get their take on things. I also interviewed a few folks who don't do real trivia at all for balance. I have released one product, ketchup, a web based note taking out. And some of the folks I interviewed were instrumental in encouraging me to release time. I also organized a conference this year, Fun Conference, out of which I made some great connections that I drew on for this talk. I interviewed 11 people in total, friends Jose Boleim and Michael Linsar from the community. They're just starting out contributing open source libraries and working on cool projects. Found her frackle and famous for her early rails, cheat sheets, Amy Hoy and founder of JSConf, Chris Williams. They're a bit of a way along speaking, sparking the community by organizing conferences and working on their own products. Joe Stumpf from simple Geo Tom from GitHub, Jan Lennon from CouchDB. They've been doing the rounds these past five years, migrating from kind of seed ideas to things that are really starting to get big. Interviewed DHH, creative rails, partner 37 signals and Toby Luke to founder of Shopify, poster boys for the rails revolution. And I interviewed Rich Kilmer, the veteran he's been here since the start. It's a solid cross section. Talking to these folks has completely inspired me. And I want to share with you some choice quotes from those interviews and some of the things that have resonated with me. I think a good place to start is my chat with Rich Kilmer. He's the CEO of InfoEther, a board member of Ruby Central. Rich was at the very first Ruby conference in London, Florida nine years ago, where he discovered as he puts it, some really interesting folks at a conference that was totally different to the Java one conferences that he'd been to before. To come and meet a community that talked about the features of different languages and the values of those things, dynamic languages versus static languages. I never had those conversations when I was doing Java development. It opened up a whole new world for me. The thing it taught me was looking at languages as what's the right language to do the thing you're trying to do. Ruby for a long time was not a place of entrepreneurship. It was a place of tinkering and people who loved the language. It was what people did on the side. Rails changed that. The Ruby and Rails communities are full of entrepreneurs. I chat with Rich about the Ruby community, this Ruby community and how it's based on a foundation of language nerds. Matt has said in the past that he is indeed a language nerd and described Ruby as being a mutant hybrid of Perl, Smalltalk, C, and Liz. Indeed, according to Rich, at that first Ruby count, there were every Smalltalkers who looked at Ruby as a nice syntactic way of getting to the power of what they knew Smalltalk had. A community of polygots, a community of lovers of language. People really cared about how their code read. Humble beginnings, maybe, but humble, significant. A couple of years later, DHH introduced Rails and the world exploded. He told me that Ruby is the technical lifeblood of 37 Signals. All the programmers of the company were brought together by a common love of the language. It has enabled me to find the best people I've ever worked with and it has given us the productivity to achieve amazing things with a tie-team. Pretty much everyone I interviewed mentioned 37 Signals. They created a movement, empowering developers to think about developing software in a completely different way. Get real, what they say, and they can continue to reap the literal profits. Joe Stump is someone who's done the brands in San Francisco starters. In the long run at dig.com, a co-founder of his own funded startup, Simple Geo, and currently working on a bootstrap project where he's using Rails. His perspective is from an outsider to reap, to provide some balance to the 37 Signals, and he has his own opinion of the movement that they created. They're lucky, he says. They're fucking lucky that Rails is where it's at now. Success is the combination of preparation and opportunity. Sometimes opportunity is based a lot on luck. Regardless, what has sprung up seems to me to be pretty exciting. It's almost like the difference is that there is a Ruby community, says Tom Preston Warner, co-founder of GitHub. I'm sure there are PHP and cold fusion communities, but when I was working in them, it never felt like it was very close knit, and the Ruby community very much feels like that. It's the conferences, the small conferences that are put on, the mailing lists. It's just people meeting up and doing users groups. And so we have a community based around smart, creative developers, and a movement heavily influenced by 37 Signals, a flagship company who teaches how to be street smart business guys bootstrapping our software companies. Tobias Newton puts it really well. Ruby was kind of a counter culture thing, but one that was founded on really sad principles. It's hard to realize now just how big Java was in 2005 and how heretical it was to say that what Java was doing is actually complete shit. That's clearly what the Ruby community said. This antagonized a lot of people, but it also made a lot of people check out what Ruby was all about. A lot of people found out that this was a really good system and a good foundation for building companies or building technology. He goes on to illustrate evolution. What happened from the top? A lot of very smart thinkers in the programming community joined. You had this incredible influx of amazing thinkers. On the second side there was an incredible influx of people from the bottom, those with the designers. So the designers were great at what they were doing, but they finally said you know what, something about this Ruby thing connects better with me than the other programming languages. Maybe I should learn programming. And what you have is at the top these really experienced guys being augmented by these incredible thinkers. At the bottom end people who were starting to program who were massively influenced by the right side of the brain, design thinkers, people with incredible aesthetics and sense of design and how things should be put together. He tells a wonderful story of a cute experience in the first Rails conference in Chicago. In the elevator someone asked me what this conference was all about. It was an elderly gentleman. I told him this was a programming conference. He said he was really surprised because the people are way too well dressed for a developer conference. He said most of the people walking around seemed to know how to put together a good outfit. That doesn't look like a programming group. And it doesn't look, it doesn't quite look like when you go to the Linux user group. It's a bit of a different world. So we have the Ruby community. A well dressed, tightly knit community. A community of folks who care deeply about the language and about languages in general. A place of tinkering, a place of pragmatists, a place I think that is a bastion of a harbor for entrepreneurial spirit. A good group for making change in the world. One question I asked of everyone I talked to was do you consider yourself an entrepreneur? What does being an entrepreneur mean to you? I was all ready to say that everyone I spoke to considered themselves entrepreneurs until DHH shall meet this. Entrepreneur is an overloaded term these days and even in its purest form only relates to the start. You wouldn't call Steve Jobs an entrepreneur anymore. I prefer to just go by business owner. Judging from the other responses I have to say it's easy to see why you think it was an overloaded term. A person who creates a business or a non-profit. Somebody who looks at a problem not with negativity, but with positivity and potential for finding solutions. An entrepreneur looks at a lot of different ideas, taking the good ones, idea after idea and executing them on a monthly, quarterly basis. Someone who is willing to assume a great amount of risk to see ideas exist in the world. It's like basically not taking no or impossible as an answer ever. An entrepreneur is someone who's happier building their own stuff than not working, than working with someone else's stuff. They have different answers. It's a bit difficult to draw conclusion from this melting pot of definitions. Where does the programming language even fit into all of this? It makes me think of Yehuda Katz's keynote at RailsConf this year, where he unleashed this rallying cry. Ruby makes easy things trivial, hard things easy, and impossible things possible. That to me sums it up well. So I've talked about community and a bit about what it is to be an entrepreneur. So what about bootstrapping? Of everyone I spoke to, no one thought that bootstrapping was a bad idea. Having spoken to countless thugs in the topic in the past, I've rarely heard anyone disagree. That said, it hasn't shaken my interest in raising money through venture capital and angel investment, and before rejecting something outright, I want to know what it is I'm rejecting and what. Toby gave me some super balanced advice on playing the VC game. Taking investment, he says, is simply a tool in the toolbox. About this tool, DHH illustrates the strong 37 signals party line epitomized in the likes of their blog series Bootstrapped, Propitabon Proud. VCs aren't evil unless you fall for their temptation. They will do evil things to protect their investments the best way they know how, often with crude and brute force. The base fact is that most software businesses just don't need capital, so taking it is a bad idea. Joe Stone cites Zappos as an example of why VC can be that bad idea. Faced with a VC fund wrapping up its 10 year cycle, Tony Shea, who wanted to continue growing the company, was essentially forced to sell to Amazon. Well, we're not all Tony Shea sitting on already fantastic business. Disappointed to have to settle for a two hundred and fourteen million dollar exit. Rich Kilmer elaborates, I would never go to a VC these days if you don't already have something that's Bootstrapped. You want to go to a VC always with velocity. You don't ever want to go to them with an idea. It's too inexpensive to actually make the idea gain plus. Too inexpensive to make the idea gain velocity. And that's the consensus. Toby furthers the thought. The right way to build a company is to try to do without financing. Maybe allow an angel investor in to get the contact and create your product. Try to get to profitability. Follow the 37 signals match up all the way. But once you get to the point where you know your business really well where you say, I know how marketing works. Where I put one dollar in that I know I can get $1.80 back in 12 months. Then you start having a very clear case where you say if I could get a couple million dollars to put into this that I can get a couple more million out. That's when a company like a software as a service business should really use what's available in from the VC community. And the VC community is ecstatic if you approach them like this. In fact, they rarely get opportunities like this. They love it. Super clear advice. It's also important to know your investors. They don't really care about you as an individual. That's something you should know about says Rich Kilmer. They care about your company. They're investing in an entity. The entity is the thing that gets acquired or that is successful and makes revenue, not the individual. They've been burned. He says over and over again by the founder of a company not being able to go to the next level. There's a time when you will most likely have to transition out of your position of running this company. Interestingly, he leads on. Really, if you're bootstrapping your company, you need to think of it in exactly the same way. Do you really want to run a company with a thousand employees? Toby goes back and uses about angels. Luckily, probably for the first time in this planet's history, many of the people who have the money are also nice people. I don't think that ever happened before. Many of the guys who got their millions through the Google IPL, for example, there couldn't be a nice, ecstatic people. These guys are amazing, every single one I've met. So nice people with money out there. I'm an engineer, continues Toby. I never really believed all of this handshaking and meeting people and all of that. But I've been playing this game for a couple of years now and it's really amazing what can happen after you just meet people. You really do want introductions and you want to take these lunch meetings which people always recommend. It sounds stupid, but I've just seen absolutely tremendous things happen. Going back to the former Googlers, the nice guys from Cache. Some of them are so rich, the amount of money they give away to these startup companies doesn't amount to them at all. To them, investing in startups is like what normal people have an aquarium for. Think about it. It's like these pretty fish swimming around, being all pretty and you can check it out and you don't even have to clean the fish tank. It's really cool for them. It allows them to keep an ear to the ground and see what's going on. You know, many of them are geeking out as much about technology like we do. It's just a wonderful arrangement for them. On the flip side, TPW wants to keep control. We're very profitable and so we can run the core company however we damn well please and not have to worry about anyone's approval at all. And so that's not what we want right now. So maybe VC doesn't work so well for us. It's all about what you want as a founder. Once you figure out what you want, you need to figure out what to do. Is now a good time to be a programmer and start your own business? There's lots of opportunities. Everywhere there's software that people hate, there's an opportunity. There's so much pre-existing Lego for you to get started with, says Michael Lough. The lesson of the iPad, he says, is there's no file save metaphor anywhere. The power dimes of how software looks and feels and is changing. And we, you can ride that way. There are buzzwords, techniques, tools, tips, hints and guides, hacker news, everything. Really though, says Michael. People just want to send a picture of their cap and we can help them do that. Says Chris Williams. Programmers have an innate curiosity of trying to solve stuff that's similar to what an entrepreneur is. It's a perspective on the world and you need that curiosity as a main ingredient. It's resident in every programmer. And if you're new to the game, you are very welcome, says DHH. I'm happy that we're getting influx of inexperienced people. That means that we have a unique opportunity to teach these people about good software practices and get them on the road to improve. What better way to help the world of software move forward than to educate the masses? Welcome to the Ruby community. You're in good hands here. So why Ruby? Ruby made me famous, says Aimee. She wrote a wave of increased popularity in the language by providing helpful cheat sheets to explain the tough concepts that she herself had trouble getting to grips with. Again, Toby has some great insight. We started doing these Ruby weeklies. We employ every single person who came to those meetings. It was people who were spending their free time talking about technology. That's awesome. That's just such a great cross-section of people who are really into this. People who were showing up to these meetings who were clearly the kind of people who could go into battle with it. My friend Michael, Ruby has enabled me to rapidly create from nothing an intensely agile business that can adapt to changes as they happen. And Jose Belim in Brazil, Ruby has not hindered us at all. Being one of the pioneers in the still growing Brazilian market just brought us benefits. That wave spreading out is still happening across the world. From my own experience in Ireland, people are only now really taking really unreal seriously. It's a big deal and it attracts other smart people. And so we bootstrap and we use Ruby and we're stupefied by how pretty the language is. Build simple software, charge real money. But Michael Locke got me thinking. The language doesn't fucking matter at all. What matters is whether you're going to innovate by finding the right people that bring different skill sets to the table are going to error correct you better than yourself. Maybe the language in and of itself doesn't matter. It's the people, the people. Over and over, DHH, Toby, Rich, Tom mentioned the people they fan through a common love of Ruby. Ruby brings us all together. It also got me thinking about how these principles don't need to be applied just to the software you develop. You don't have to just build a web app. Amazon and eBay, South stuff, Zappos was a shoe store but they're also software companies improving the world with software. There's just so much opportunity and Ruby enables you to get up and running very quickly. If you're the guy that designed an API that I can't stop writing because it's so beautiful, I want to fly in an airline that you set up. If you spent a year making sure every part of your app exposes an elegant, simple API to a complex, powerful system, I want to stay in your hotel chain. That's the crux of why I think Ruby is so attractive to me as a language, a community, a spirit with which to start new businesses. Ruby says to me, I care about you, Paul. I care about giving you the best experience possible. I want that everywhere. So the people in this community will bend over backwards to help you out. People want you to succeed. We're rooting for you. I'm rooting for you. I don't really know what the hell the word entrepreneur is supposed to mean, but for any and all of the definitions above, I do know that, like Rich Kilmer says, now is an incredibly fun time to be an entrepreneur. We're the folks that understood what Mark Zuckerberg in the movie meant when he said, I just need to fire up Emacs and modify that Perl script. And we're the ones that talk to ourselves, shh, what the hell is he using, Perl? Now is an amazing time to be alive, but the differences that distinguish wealthy folks from not so wealthy folks, they're shrinking. We can all play the same game. The conclusion that I'm drawing is that there's only one rule in this game of business, of entrepreneurship. There really are no rules. For every strong argument, there's an equal and opposite strong argument. For every lover, there is a hater. And for every hater, there is a troll. We all need to find our own way. We're sitting on the pinnacle of 10 years of not only a language, but a community that fosters creative spirit, welcoming of ideas and peers from the outside. It's ground and principles of programmer happiness and productivity. I don't know what the next groundbreaking shift in momentum will be. Neither do you, nor do any of the folks that I interviewed. The future, you see, is anyone's game. And since we are the inventors, the creators, the magicians, we invent the future as it approaches. So I say this, invent the future. Reimagine the world and implement it. Break down the rules and bring them back. Better, one at a time. Michael Locke says that Ruby is the place to start, but that maybe there's too much magic. I say, embrace the magic. Embrace the future. Make it your own. When it comes to building a business, it doesn't really matter what the language is. It doesn't really matter what the framework is. It's just better fucking work. And I know that everyone here cares about that too. What matters is not that you're using Ruby or Rails or whatever, but that you care deeply about the choice of language and framework. And that's a trait I see over and over in you Rubyists. My friend Jan says, if you are a person to turn ideas into products, today is a good time. Now is a fantastic time to be a programmer doing business. The Ruby community is a great place to be and the Ruby language is a great place to start. The folks that I spoke in preparing this talk and the people that I've met and are meeting today, Ruby folks, artists, enthusiasts, early adopters, visionaries, friends, supporters, entrepreneurs, my heroes, thank you.