Welcome to DevX Unpack. I'm Alan Carson, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Cloud Smith. We're solving the challenges of artefact management and are on the path to the coing, the software supply chain itself. In this weekly podcast, we share knowledge from Cloud Smith employees, customers, and other great guests from the software industry. Along the way, we'll unpack topics like the cloud security supply chains, and of course, the developer experience. I'd like to welcome you today to have a really good conversation with my good friend and colleague, Dan McKinney. I've known Dan for nearly 10 years, and we can talk a little bit about some of the origins around how we met and some of the early days in Cloud Smith right up until today. So welcome, Dan. Thank you so much for being here.

Yeah, thank you very much for having me. Alan. I must correct you immediately though, but it's been a lot longer than 10 years. You've known me,

Is it?

It is, yeah.

The years fly in, so it's hard to

Remember. Yeah, it shows you actually how old we are. I, to be honest. No, you were right. It's been about 12 years, so yeah. Yeah,

12 years. Right. Well, we first met at the New York Stock Exchange, which had bought a company in Belfast called Wombat Financial Technologies. And I think you joined in 2010, 1111,

Correct, correct. Yeah, that's right. You predated me there. I was a fresh faced graduate at that stage. Yeah, straight out of sort of university

Showing my age over years, but yes. Okay. Yeah, no, I think I interviewed you on the day

You did you and Lee Skill. Actually, the two Klyde Smith founders interviewed me on the day. I was incredibly nervous. It was an experience, but I still remember it. Yeah,

Yeah. And then you joined as a technical writer in that role?

I did. I joined the documentation team with some other now Cloud Smithers as well. And yes, that was it.

And you used to bribe us with donuts.

The best way to get answers out of people is to provide them with pastries and donuts. I learned that very quickly and that's actually something that I have maintained in my career to this very day. Even in Cloud Smith, when I want assistance, I always grease the wheels a little bit with some pastries and donuts and there

Was a bit of back and forth and a bit of time went past, but I think it's fair for us to maybe jump to when we closed the seed round in 2019 and we'd worked a little bit back and forth. Up until then, both Lee and I had draught picks of people that we wanted to bring into the company and you were mine and Tom Gibson was Lee's. So you joined us soon after we had closed that initial funding round, and I think your employee number six, is that?

I think so. I think that's right. I think

We just had our offsite last week and there was 80 people there, so we've come a long way since employee number six. So I think it would be great to maybe go back to 2019 and have a bit of a chat about some of the early days and how we made that work. And you can rega us with stories of bringing even more donuts into the office.

Yeah, I'd love to actually. Yes, you're absolutely correct as you tell it. So I started after you'd got the seed funding alongside Tom Gibson. We both came from the same other company. We joined on the same day and walked into the Cloud Smith office. And there was just sort of yourself and Lee and Patty and Peter at that stage, and myself and Tom, a very different cloud Smith to what it is today. You mentioned the offsite just two weeks ago there. I got my five years Lego brick. We get a brick for every year that we're in the company. So I got my five year Lego brick. It takes pride of place on my shelf beside me, but yeah, what a different cloud Smith, what a different cloud Smith we walked into, and I remember one of the first things you said to me when I walked into the much smaller Cloud Smith office as well.
One of the first things you said to me was basically, Dan, we don't have any documentation. Can you please go through all of the web chats that we've had with users and build up a compendium of questions and let's get started on the documentation. And that was one of my first projects. I mean, those early days, there was so lovers that we all did everything, everybody pitched in regardless of what needed done. But the first big task was to clean up the documentation and well actually create the documentation. So now of course I have a bit of a background in technical writing, so I really like documentation and I actually find writing documentation to be very therapeutic because you really get to sit down and break something down into first principles and put sort of pen on paper. I really do like that process. So it was a great way to introduce myself to the Cloud Smith platform and to all the features and functionality and really get familiar with that because of course the next thing after that was to get out in front of some customers and talk to customers. And it was a really, really good way to learn my way around and actually be useful to customers as well.

Yeah. Yes. I should say we hired as the first dev rail

Rule.

That was your role at the very beginning, and you didn't have any formal dev rail experience at that point, but I was like, Dan's the guy. He's got the right temperament, technical writing, background videos. We also went through a period of making quite a few videos

We did

Where you coined the phrase, I am Dan from Cloud Smith.

Lemme see if I can still do it. It's been a while. It was, hi, Dan from Cloud Smith here. That was the phrase. That was the phrase. Yeah, I still do that on occasion, on the offsites and things. No, that's right. It was dev rail. I was hired in too. I didn't have formal dev rail experience, but I'd been client facing before in other roles, so that was fine. And of course, I have a hobby on the weekends where I work as a dj, so not a stranger to a microphone or a stage, even if I'm not that kind of dj. Still do know how to do it. So yeah, we very much binged the videos, Alan. So I think we created 50 tutorial videos or 40 tutorial videos in the matter of a few months, which I also really enjoyed. I really enjoyed that part of it. It was good to do that, and I think we need to revisit them. I'd like to update them again, but yeah, really good experience at the start.

You also have a pretty epic background.

Will I tell a fun story about that actually, Alan?

Yes, please.

Okay. So yes, I collect retro computing things. So on the shelves behind me there are some old video game consoles and Commodore Omega computers. And of course I have my retro reproduction arcade machines. Pacman is one of my favourites. And so the story goes, I'm not a brilliant Pac-Man player, but Alan, you came to my house one night and you had a go on my Pac-Man machine, and you absolutely destroyed both my high score and my 10-year-old son's high scored. So Alan then top of the leaderboard, couldn't unsee you as much as I tried. I could not unsee your high score until the day that Mr. Glenn Weinstein Cloud Smith, CEO, visited my house. He had a single go on the Pac-Man machine completely destroyed your high score, and it has stayed that way ever since. If I turn that machine on right now, it's Glen's high score that is at the top. So yes, so there you go. So you were unceremoniously unseated never to be regained the again.

Yeah, best thing Glen's score is on my bucket list of things to do before I die.

Yes. I actually think Glenn hustled us because he said very casually, oh, can I have a go on your Pac-Man machine? And then it was like in the movies when the frame freezes and then people go, it was at that moment I knew I'd messed up. That's what it was like when Glen got on the machine. He was doing this a special move, like a back and forth wiggle of Pacman, which I'd never seen before. And that totally sent the ghosts into disarray and they all went off in the wrong directions and everything. And I immediately thought, okay, this man has spent a lot of time on Pacman and didn't indicate that in any way. So there you go.

Well, he was in the Navy in the eighties, so I suspect they probably had many video games.

I think so

To play. But he's a proper player. We're just

Fanatics. I'm casual compared to Glen. He really showed us who was boss that day in the most sort of unexpected way, but yeah,

Can they had a Pacman machine at CubeCon in Salt Lake City, and he and I went off and bused each other and he still beat me.

Yeah, the man's a natural. He's a natural. Absolutely. Yeah. But I mean honestly, all my time in CL Smith has been filled with little anecdotes like that. Yeah, it's been a hell of a journey. And I mean you'll remember the most of it. You'll remember the old Cloud Smith office where I crawled around in the attic space to drop ethernet cables down the chimneys. We dropped holes and drop them down the chimney. We had no wired networking in the rooms, and we did it all ourselves.

We used to call you the ferret.

Yep, the ferret. That's what they called me. And it was because you are too tall and Lee's very tall as well. You're both much taller than me. Neither of you could navigate in those small spaces in the attics and in the back rooms. So yeah, we wanted, even then Lee wanted the best of the best in terms of networking. So we had to, but we, we only had five or six people who had to do it ourselves.

That was completely wild. So that was with multiple offices over the years, that was kind of, it wasn't where Cloud Smith was born, but it was the one where we broke and broke the product and did most of the work. And it was like a hundred year old house, and there was this little room where we were going to call that the server room, and we wanted to put the server in there, and I cut a hole in the ceiling of a hundred year old house in order to get up into the little tiny attic to be able, and the other crazy thing I did was I drilled a hole up. Yes, yes. That direction up like

45 degrees through three walls

In order to get up into the top attic in order to get the cables down the chimneys. So it was matte. But anyway, it all worked.

It did work. It did work, actually did work. And look, in some ways, Alan, I think it's actually a bit of a testament to the culture that you guys have brought and continued to bring to Cloud Smith because I mean, we made it work with whatever resources we had on hand, and it was also completely over-engineered. It was way more than we needed, which I think still carries through Alan. Even the lock that you put on the server room door, which was just a cupboard. It was this massive chub lock that you would see on a bank vault or something. I couldn't believe it. It was

Ridiculous engineer. It was the largest lock I could find at the time. It looked like it.

Yeah. Yeah. I remember going into that room and seeing this huge lock on the door and thinking there's only some switches in here. There wasn't even any servers because we're entirely based in the cloud. It was literally only switches and routing. There was no storage or anything. There was no machines. So yeah, very engineered for a hundred x skill, even though the skill wasn't there at the time. So

I

Think that speaks to,

I like to think we're security focused,

Extremely security focused, couldn't even get into our own rooting cabinet.
Yeah, no, but I genuinely mean that. Actually, that was one of the things that drew me most to Cloud Smith in those early days. You were right. That wasn't the office where Smith was born, but I remember Cloud Smith Alpha launching and it was even branded as such on the website. And I remember the excitement when the first few customers started to trickle in through things like the web chat and sign up for the product and publish packages to the platform. I remember the excitement then I do. And that excitement and that desire to build the best was exactly what drew me. It was exactly why I left my previous job and came to Cloud Smith because it was palpable. I mean, I felt that every day when I walked into the office. I felt that definitely it was real

Exciting times. I mean, I don't know if you know this, but in those early days, you were one of the few vocal positive people about what we were trying to do. There was a lot of, not negativity, but a lot of, we don't uncertainty uncertainty. We don't know what you guys are trying to do. We don't know. And most people don't know the domain
And don't know the technology that we were trying to build. And I mean, there was many, many days where I'm like, well, Dan believes in us. Dan thinks it's a good, and that did carry us far because there was quite a lot of detractors. All of those detractors turned around and became very positive once we started to get a bit of traction. But in those early days when you don't have the traction to really prove your thesis on what you're trying to build and what you're trying to do, it is very difficult. So you were a big part of that those early days.

I appreciate that, Alan. It's nice to hear, but I genuinely did get it in the role before I joined Cloud Smith after the seed funding, it was a consultancy and I was building infrastructure and a fleet of web servers for public sector things. And at that time we didn't have a centralised artefact management solution, and I knew they existed, but we didn't want to stand up yet another on premise self-hosted tool that we would have to maintain. We were a really small team. We didn't have the resources to take on any additional tooling. So I was pulling dependencies down from public repositories when I was running an Ansible script to build out some infrastructure, build out some web servers. I was just fetching things from wherever I could get them. And I knew at the time that wasn't great. I did know that it wasn't the best thing you could do, but we were resource limited and we couldn't stand up our own artefact registry, and I could see the need for a SaaS product much at the time in that job we used GitLab and we used GitLab SaaS, and I could see that being totally useful as our version control system.
It was obvious, and I knew in myself that, well, why don't we just have the same for binaries and artefacts? But at the time, there wasn't an option there. So yeah, I was positive about it and I knew that it was a gap that needed filled in my mind certainly. And that was from sitting in a job where I was potentially an end user of such a product.

And now you're on the other side of it now, very much so. You are in solutions engineering.

I am out in the trenches in the front line, as I say goes. I love it. I love being out in the front line. There's nothing better than actually talking to people who have a problem that they want the solution for. And I truly believe when I talk to those people that we have a solution for them. And it isn't that we don't try to make a square peg fit in the round hole. It isn't about that. It's about matching the actual solution to the problem. Because the thing is as well, and I think this is throughout Cloud Smith, but certainly for me, if a user has a problem that actually isn't a good fit for Cloud Smith, the platform, we would do them and ourselves a disservice by trying to awkwardly make that problem fit the Cloud Smith platform. That's not the way you're going to get a happy user, a happy customer. They're going to get frustrated, they're going to have a bad opinion of the product, and it just doesn't serve anybody, doesn't serve them, doesn't serve us. So I do get very excited about helping people solve their artefact management problems, but in a way that is genuine and really, really works. I just like dealing with people as well. It's a great role. I encourage anybody to look at

It. We've always been pretty people focused.

Oh yeah,

You went from Dev Rail essentially into customer support. I mean, you wore many hats over the years, but in terms of headline roles, that's probably customer support and then CSM and then solutions engineering. So it's been quite the journey

It has been. And what a brilliant way to expand my skillset, and this is one of the great things about joining early is no, I don't think there's any better career accelerator than working in a startup and growing a startup, honestly, because the breadth of experience that you get is just unrivalled. But you are correct in that my roles have always been user facing. Even back to the start through documentation. It was user facing through documentation at the start, but then it became direct with the videos, the tutorials straight on to, I mean, you wouldn't even have called them sales calls at the start because we didn't have a growth or a sales team. We just had ourselves, but it was very much straight on to calls. And then CSM, again, lots of calls as A CSM and yeah, now building out the solutions engineering team, which genuinely I am excited about. I really am. I love my job. Yeah.

Dan, you're talking to customers a lot at the minute and prospective customers, what sort of challenges are you seeing from their perspective in terms of how we can solve problems for them?

Right. That's a great question and I could probably talk about that for a long time, so I will try to distil it down a little bit. A lot of what we're hearing today is customers and users are more aware than ever of the importance of software supply chain security. And that has many, many facets. It really does. We could probably do a podcast on each of these really if we wanted to dig into them deeper. But a lot of our users come to us to say, look, we have taken the initial steps towards a better software supply chain, so we have centralised our artefact management, but we're hosting it ourselves or we want to centralise it because our teams have a lot of autonomy and they all have their own tools at the minute and they're doing their own thing. That's the first bit. The second bit is people are becoming more interested in software bill of materials, in salsa, in provenance, in attestations, traceability, visibility, but they don't yet.
A lot of people don't yet have a cohesive strategy there. So they're actually not just looking for one platform that's going to solve all of their problems here. That's not what we're really hearing in the market. What we're hearing is they want to know best practises, they want to know a solution that will fit for them, but they are open to it being best in class tools rather than just one large tool that tries to solve all their problems. So they want to build a better tool chain for software supply chain security. And I find there is an increasing awareness that artefact management is essentially the foundation that that's built on. So a lot of people do seem to have that understanding that that's your first step is getting a good handle on your artefact management packages in packages out. That's the very basic 1 0 1. Everything else you build on top of that. And that can be other tools, it can be other platforms, but that's what I'm hearing a lot. I've yet to meet an enterprise who actually think that they have this all figured out. There's a really lovely self-awareness there that I hear from enterprises that they know it's not perfect. They haven't hit the golden path yet.
They really want to, and they're making steps and it is step changes because there's a lot of work to be done there, but they're making steps in that direction. So that's what I'm hearing in the market essentially.

Well, that's amazing because that really leans into the original premise for Cloud Smith. So just to sort of roll back the years, I mean we started from a software distribution point of view nearly rather than the storage aspect. And it was more like how do you make it easy to distribute software? And then that obviously became an artefact management platform within the first conversation. And yeah, I mean it was fairly contrarian at the time and I think over the years, the ecosystem has evolved and I think a lot of, we didn't know it was the right thinking at the time, but it has sort of been validated to being the right thinking at the time. So it's really lovely to hear that some of those early decisions that we made and leaned into in terms of the technology and the approach and ultimately the DNA of where we started has started to sort of bear fruit. I mean, it's lovely getting into hands of customers. That has always been the driver of getting into as many developers hands as possible, solving problems for not just developers but security teams and ciso. It's

Really satisfied.

Yeah. Yeah,

It is. I have to say, Alan just you mentioned some of those early decisions, right? And I can certainly see this. Cloud Smith is a really evolving platform. So we are always adding new features, new functionality where we're always doing that. But definitely some of those early decisions that you and Lee and the team made our are still the underpinnings of what drives us forward today. There's no doubt about that. Some of those already features even that have been added are still what really makes Cloud Smith stand out. And I hear that all the time when I talk to people that are evaluating Cloud Smith and I'm doing a platform overview demo or something for them, there's certain parts of the product where I see, I can physically see the people on the call leaning in and the interest sparking. And some of those are the really early decisions that you took some of those really early architectural decisions in a lot of cases. Now of course, we're evolving the platform. I'm now using our new web ui. We have a whole new web app. So progress never sleeps like that, but definitely I think that those early decisions were key, absolutely key.

No, I have to admit, every time I feel like creatively blocked, I can just watch you do your demo and then my mind immediately sees all the things that we need to fix and change and do, and I can just see this sort of roadmap appearing in front of my eyes. So it's a really good way to get to understand what the challenges are for our customers when you actually look at it yourself.

That's right. There's no substitute, and I actually say this even to people that are looking to value Cloud Smith, there is no substitute for getting hands on trying to work through a problem, build a workflow, build a process from end to end, from building in your CICD to publishing to fetching at the other end. There's no substitute for that. Documentation's brilliant. I love documentation. It's as much as part of the product as the product itself in my opinion. Tutorial video is fantastic, but they're only pieces of the puzzle. Really the biggest piece is get an account, sign in, start pushing packages, start fetching packages, start a plan, policies, security scans, everything like that. So I actually encourage people to do that quite early in the process when they're evaluating Cloud Smith. Even I do encourage people to get hands on pretty quickly.

So in the very early days of Cloud Smith, we had created a very self-service platform where you could basically come in, put your credit card in, just start to ease the platform, and you didn't really need to talk to anybody, although we were very happy to talk to people through chat or whatever. It's very different now. We're now pushing very much towards enterprise deals. You've been sort of here throughout the journey of coming from that very early stage up until last year, I think we did, we beat our best deal three or four different times over the year. What are some of the challenges that you've seen or some of the evolution that has happened and terms of how we engage with those customers?

Yeah, that's actually a great question. So the role of solutions engineering in Cloud Smith has changed dramatically as the type of customer has changed. So you're absolutely right in the early days, you'll remember this, Alan, we had, and I suppose this is probably typical for SaaS products, especially when they start up, we had a range of subscriptions all the way from things that would fit an individual developer up to a small to medium sized enterprise. And we've refined that as we've grown. So we've simplified it. We have three subscription tiers today and we've definitely become, and I almost think it's almost been like a natural progression that we've become more enterprise focused. So when I look at some of the early companies that I dealt with, they were sort of a reflection of Cloud Smith. They were small little startups. They were very forward thinking, ready to try the latest and greatest technology.
They could move very fast. They had small development team. They were very agile, all of that kind of stuff. Like I say, a reflection of ourselves. As time has moved on and as the Cloud Smith product has matured and added more features and functionality, we have become more attractive to the enterprise. Honestly, just naturally. I remember the first sort of larger, let's call 'em a well-known household name that came to us. This was around our series A funding round, and there was almost a sense of amusement that an organisation like that would look at Cloud Smith and that we were feature rich enough at that stage to solve their problems. Now it's gone even further in the last year, as you mentioned, I've dealt with some enterprises that are literally at the very top of their specific industry vertical. So they are the top of the top, and that's a whole different set of challenges there.
Those enterprises, typically they have to move a bit slower and it's just a product of inertia because they maybe have 2000, 3000 developers, 5,000 developers, hundreds of teams, thousands of CICD workloads. That's just the nature. But with that longer process also comes a lot more stakeholders. So you'll be across the enterprise, there'll be stakeholders from developer experience platform engineering, there'll be application security, there'll be actual security people. There'll be lots. So a much greater breadth of stakeholders all with their own requirements and priorities and concerns. So that was entirely new for me as a solutions engineer, having not engaged an enterprise of that scale before. So it really meant essentially more engagement for us. So with those kinds of enterprises, we would do when they're evaluating Cloud Smith at the very start with the smaller companies, maybe had a weekly call, check in on the evaluation, see how things were going.
Those larger enterprises, I'll do daily calls, we will work collaboratively with them on an evaluation plan. We will agree that we will go through it. It's a much more defined process. That idea of a proof of value process is much more defined and has much more people involved. And it's really exciting, actually. It's really exciting to deal with different sets of priorities and stakeholders. It isn't them. I don't just sit on calls with the scene. It'll be a different group of people every day in a week. It'll be a different bunch and we'll be having a different topic and there'll be a different plan that comes out of that. So yeah, it's comparing apples the oranges. Really. It is. It's so different. But I'll just finish by saying I don't feel that we ever explicitly in the early days, especially pushed that an agenda. We were just building the best platform that we could think of and see and do based on our feedback. And it was doing that. That brought us under the lens of bigger enterprises. So it felt really natural to me. It felt like a really natural progression.

Yeah. Well, I mean, I've always felt that we sat, we're set at a level where really it doesn't matter what size you are, you can get value from CL Smith. I think the more complexity that grows into large enterprises, probably the value and the solution becomes more hardened. But there's something in there for everybody across the board.

Absolutely. Look, we have not in any way left behind the smaller startups. I just did a call yesterday with a small startup company, actually, their CTO was on the call. He was a founder and a principal engineer, and I think that there's only 10 people in the entire company. They're just a little startup in the security space, but we absolutely do have a fit for them. They can take our velocity plan, and I have high confidence it's going to be great for them. And I spent 45 minutes yesterday chatting away to those folks. I even managed to solve one of their technical problems on the call, which is always a win. I've come away feeling really great about that, but they are like the polar opposite of some of the bigger deals that I'm in at the moment and the bigger enterprises that I'm dealing with. But they were really excited about the product and they were really happy to use it, and I got a lovely feeling from them that they would be a really happy and satisfied customer. So we totally do still have that for those smaller enterprises, and I really like that. We still do. I really like that. We still do.

I also think it's really interesting, no matter how many customers that we get visibility on our potential customers, every tool chain is different.

Oh my goodness.

There is literally no, there's plenty of overlap, but there no two tool chains are the same.

None. And I blame you for this, Alan, you Andy, excellent. You always picked the hard problems, right? You didn't pick a website for booking something, right? No. You always picked the really hard problems. When you look at, you do a bit of matrix math across package types, the client tooling for all those package types, the CI CD platforms that will build and distribute all those package types. When you do this, it is a ridiculous number of permutations and combinations. It's thousands. It's literally thousands. And that's, like I say, that is a really thorny problem to solve to actually normalise that experience. It reminds me, Alan, of Macy technologies and normalising market feeds from hundreds of stock exchanges who all sent out data with their own field names and their own protocols. And the whole premise there was we'll consume all of this for you, normalise it and give you a nice, digestible, repeatable interface to it. It's not lost on me. That is, there's definitely similarities there.

Yeah, no, there's a lot of parallels to that where, and Lee and I were doing that for four years before this, and there's even parallels to Lee's previous business, which was primarily search technology, and there's a lot of that built into Cloud Smith. So yeah, I mean it is sort of the sum of our past all coming together, but in many ways that's why it works.

Exactly. And you can't fake that, and you can't fake the sum of lifetime's experience. Do you know what I mean? But I think people sense that when they talk to Cloud Smith and when they deal with us, we are much more of, I think we try to be a genuine partner to our users more than just a transactional vendor. We definitely are. We definitely are. But it goes all the way back, like I say, to a lifetime of experience.

Dan, you mentioned that there's some real lean in moments from some of the customer calls that you do. What typically are you showing or what are the things that customers tend to lean into?

There's a couple. There's a couple. There are definitely a couple of choice moments that people do set up and pay attention to. So I think one of the big ones is are multi-format repositories. So that idea of being able to essentially structure your artefact, your package estate in an entirely new and flexible way, that is one. And that really grabs people's attention, if I'm honest. It just opens up the possibilities. It just means that we are not coming to people and saying, when you use the Cloud Smith platform, you must do something this way. Of course, we have advice and best practises, and a lot of that actually has come from our learnings with our customers. We talk to them all the time. We find out what works, we find out what doesn't work, what the best practises and patterns are, and we share that with people that are evaluating Cloud Smith, but the choice is theirs. They have freedom with Cloud Smith and multi-format repositories underpin that they underpin so much. They underpin visibility and traceability and how you're going to apply policies and how you're going to apply access controls. And there's a real breadth of capability there that actually hinges on just that structure. And it's been like that from day one. That was one of those early choices that you guys made that that was going to be a difference with Cloud Smith as a platform. That's definitely a big one. That's a huge one, I think.

Okay. Anything else?

Yes, there are. I'm glad you asked that one. There are. So yes, I was giving you a moment to see if you would bite there and you did. So no, the other one is Cloud Smith Access tokens. Entitlement tokens we call them. So that's one that I think is really easy to miss. I find that one flies under the radar oil a little bit because when you think of an access token, people are very familiar with credentials and authentications and access tokens. But what makes those Cloud Smith access tokens so powerful is actually the way you can scope them. So you can scope them in terms of what access they grant write down to one single artefact if you wanted to do that, or a group of artefacts or a version range or a particular tag on an artefact even. You can grant access just to that.
But also then the other side of controls that they offer are usage controls. So you can say, set an automatic expiry date, or this token can consume so many downloads per week or per Fortnite or per month. And that I don't think that's obvious to people that just basically haven't ever used an access token that was so configurable before. So that I think, and I love talking about that. I love to get to that section of a platform overview where I get to explain that because I think it really resonates. Again, I find that I don't have to push it, I don't have to double down on it or anything. I find that it just clicks. So yeah, access to token's a huge one. Another huge one for me.

The best things happen in threes. So is there a third?

They do. They absolutely do happen in threes. So the other thing that I think really resonates with people is, and it's not people's fault that there's a confusion around this. I don't think this is explained very well in the industry even, but that difference between an instance based model of something and a truly fully distributed cloud native application, I don't think that that's another one that clicks when you go through it. So I understand why there is a confusion there. A lot of tools are essentially the same tool that you would self-host yourself a long time ago. It would've been in the Cloud Smith cupboard on a server, but a lot of cloud tools are essentially those same tools, but they're just hosted on AWS or Google Compute, and they're managed. The vendor will manage the hosting for you, but that's still very different from a fully distributed application where there are no individual instances running on a resource constrained machine of some kind.
And that's, again, not immediately obvious. That tends to come out as we're going through the platform and people are realising, oh, actually, so my artefacts classic question people will say is how I have development teams in the US and in Europe, and how do I ensure that my artefacts are highly available for teams that are globally distributed? And it's a bit of a revelation when you say, well, actually, you don't really have to think about that because that's just the way Cloud Smith is architected. We do that essentially behind the scenes for you. You don't need to stand up an instance in Europe, an instance in the us, an instance in apac. You can forget about that. I think that's pretty much a revelation for a lot of people, even though they may get that with other tools that they use, and they also don't get it with other tools in their stack. And it becomes obvious once you sort of pointed out.

So Dan, it's been great chatting with you today. It's just a couple more questions. What's the thing you most love about Cloud Smith?

Okay, you put me on the spot, I could sit and say, I could sound like a real cliche and I could say, oh, I love the people, which I do. Which I do. At the end of the day, it was the people that drew me to Cloud Smith. It was the people that drew me to Cloud Smith.

My answer is the people.

Yes. Well, I'll not take that one then. Well, I'll take it slightly. I'll say, really what I love about Cloud Smith, it is, it's actually an intersection. It's an intersection of people and technology. And that's what really appeals to me because when I work in Cloud Smith, I am working on, I feel like I'm on the cutting edge. I feel like we are breaking new ground all the time, and we are enabling our users to break new ground. They along with us, are on that journey, and they're not doing it themselves, and we're not doing it ourselves. It's very much together we're doing this. But I say it's an intersection because yes, the people really matter. They really do. The people really matter, and we hear that as well. When we deal with users of Cloud Smith, we build relationships, we do build relationships. We just do. Maybe that's some of our innate nature, the type of people that we are. We're headquartered in Belfast now. We're a fully distributed team, but we have a culture to us. And that intersection of that culture with cutting edge technology, that's really exciting. It genuinely is. And I'm not just saying that because I work for Cloud Smith, but I feel it. I feel it. I really do.

No, that's great. Look, it's been great chatting with you today. We could chat for S and s and S over all the years and all the stories. So I would love to have you back on at some point and we can dig into, because there's a good story about a webinar that we didn't get to share today. Just one last question before you go, is there anything that I haven't asked about today that you'd love to share?

That's a great question. That is a fantastic question I would like to share, Alan. I would like to share, I might embarrass you slightly on this, so it was a long time ago. It was pre-Cloud Smith Alpha, and I just remember this ties into what you said earlier about in the early days there was a lot of, not disbelief, but there was a lot of, it was misunderstood. The mission of Cloud Smith artefact management was misunderstood. And I just remember you standing on stage at the startup World Cup wearing a t-shirt that just said, Alan, across the front of it and nothing else, black T-shirt that just said, Alan, and you were trying to put across the importance of artefact management, the mission of artefact management and what Klaus Smith was trying to build. And I sat in the audience at that startup World Cup, and I think it dawned on me then what a challenge you had taken on, what a challenge you had taken on.
When I saw the other startup companies get up and do their pitch, I just thought, my God, Lee and Alan, they're really shooting for the stars here. That was my impression at the time that there were so many easier things that you guys could have chosen to pursue. And yeah, that's a takeaway. The takeaway from that for me was that you weren't afraid of the challenge. You weren't intimidated by it. And I'm sure there was people around you telling you that, would you not consider this or would you not consider that and trying to steer you, but you were never steered. You were never steered. You stuck true to that original mission. And yeah, that was my takeaway. And like I say, that now lives on in that intersection of people and technology. It's still there. It's still there. So yeah, I remember it. I was there.

Yeah, well, we had very humble plans to take over the world.

Exactly. That's it. Yes. That's it. That's it. Yeah. But you also had,

By the way, I stole that black t-shirt with the Allen, which I got printed. I stole that from Tom Cruise in The Colour of Money. He had a vent. I always liked that in terms of just the completely ridiculous confidence to wear a t-shirt with your own name on it. And I was just

Like, but that's it. That's what it takes. It takes that, it takes that. It verges on delusional, right? That belief.

Oh, well, we were absolutely delusional, but

That's it. That's what it needs. That's what it needs, because you're not going to change anything by just doing something that's slightly different or slightly better, right? Yes, sure. You might build something out of it, but you're not going to affect change, right? You're not really going to do that. That's what I liked and I was summed up in that Allen t-shirt. Like that said it all to me at the time. Yeah.

Well thank you so much for being here today. It was great chatting to you. I really enjoyed it. Love to do it again, so we'll definitely have you back on.

I would happily do it again. I say at the end of my calls a lot when I talk to users of Cloud Smith. Look, I would happily talk about artefact management for ours, and it's not a very interesting topic for a lot of people, but I'm really passionate about it and thanks for listening to me talk about things like that, so I appreciate it. Alright, thank you.