Kalen and Willem talk to Filip Ralpwslo and Bartek Igielski about Cats, VueStorefront and Composable Commerce.
Recorded on October 24, 2022
Link to the video version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEe3tf1xUYo
--
00:00 Intro to Episode 239, warm welcome to Filip Rakowski and Bartek Igielski
00:28 Filip and Barteks relationship to Magento
02:31 The many Magento frontends Bartek made
06:16 How much Filip changed after Forbes 30 under 30
10:33 VSF "the company" is doing good and the cats are healthy
15:39 Forbes selection process
17:35 How VSF became independent company from Divante / Y Combinator
27:26 Work ethics - Pomodoro Technique for productivity - VSF Management
34:30 VSF company structure - Remote work
38:36 Async communication - Arguments for/against meetings
42:02 MACH / Composable - Has Magento always been composable?
50:58 Composable and single-points of failure
57:06 Composable vendor lock in
1:00:06 The dream of Interchangeability - Unified data models
1:06:10 Outro, thanks to our guests Filip and Bartek
[00:00:00]
[00:00:00] Kalen: Hello and welcome to Ma Talk. I'm Kalin. I'm Bill
[00:00:03] Filip: and we're
[00:00:04] Willem: here today ahead with our friends, BTech and Philip from View Storefront. Hey guys. Hello.
[00:00:14] Bartek: Hello.
[00:00:15] Kalen: They used to be orange, now they're green. It's a bit of, it's a long and winding story.
[00:00:22] Bartek: It's kind of both.
[00:00:25] Kalen: It's a what kind of both? It.
[00:00:29] Willem: [00:00:30] It's an interesting statement because fuel soft fund is very much partially, well, I mean, you are agnostic from the, uh, backend agnostic, but uh, your roots came from Magental.
But I guess Philip, you, you never fully, like, you're never a full magental guy, so to say. You were, you were always agnostic kind of, Right?
[00:00:53] Filip: I mean, I was being ent I was doing case bit of mato one, I was being little bit of mato to, to just, you [00:01:00] know, at least know how painful it is. But yeah, I was more like a front end guy, so I was more focusing on the front end framework.
I started with s than VJs be the free act. It was never very deep into any commerce platform. I mostly work with APIs of like commerce, tool commerce and other ones. But when it comes to the digging into the cults and, you know, smashing some php, it was only modern of. Wow. Only .
[00:01:29] Willem: [00:01:30] Yeah, that's what I meant.
Like you, you never cut your hands that dirty on Magento code itself. You always had the luck to, um, just work on the hatless and the hatless part and not touch, You have the backend coat, which is, uh, I guess it's different for Botec, isn't it? you, Yeah. Yeah. You've done a lot more of a.
[00:01:53] Bartek: Uh, I started Meto one and was there for quite some time, uh, [00:02:00] basically till I left snow.
I was like always kind of related to doing somewhere there because our biggest customer was under Meto one, so it was like, uh, obvious choice, but al stuff too also hit me and uh, that's the reason I wrote some stuff that was then open sourced. Mm-hmm. . And some of you may know me just because of that was the, you, what was the open [00:02:30] source stuff that you worked on?
Uh, so the first, uh, open source team, I guess, was from Snow Dog was the, the, the blank version in the, uh, SaaS. Uh, and along with that, the frontals, uh, then we also released the, another team, uh, the, the Alpaca team. Uh, well, we did a few things for the community.
[00:02:56] Willem: Yeah, I think a lot of, a lot of people, a lot of [00:03:00] agencies still work with, uh, PAC today.
Uh, and, uh, that was your, your birth child, your brain, your brain child, uh, so to say. Do you know what, what happens to that, to that now, now that you, um, you left Snow dock. Are your former colleagues taking that over? Uh, it's
[00:03:21] Bartek: maintained. Mm-hmm. , but most likely there is not going to be a, a new big realists that is changing a lot.
They are just [00:03:30] keeping, uh, the stores that they build right now, maybe even building, uh, another one and that, uh, but there will be no revolution. Mostly because they also start using Hova, as far as I know. So,
[00:03:44] Willem: uh, that that's true. Yeah. I happen to know That's true. But yeah, I, I know that they're just starting with the first, with the first implementation.
The,
[00:03:56] Kalen: the question, the whole line of questioning from Willam was [00:04:00] bullshit from the beginning. It was a leading, it was a leading question from the beginning. So Bartech is your, are anybody, anybody gonna maintain that? Meanwhile, in the back of his head, He knows. He already knows. Save
[00:04:14] Bartek: Faith. No, no,
[00:04:16] Filip: no, no, no.
[00:04:20] Willem: uh, you think you think I'm some kind of evil? No. Uh, no. I felt, uh, I mean there's a lot of agencies still, still working with it and, uh, [00:04:30] I mean you've, uh, you've worked on that for such a long time that I think it's stable. Um, how anyone can use it. It's free. That's a big plus, which, um, I can't say for Hova, but, um, uh, I think for us, it enables us to build a whole ecosystem around it.
And we invest and like we have support where people doing their implementations, they can ask us questions and we try to help them as [00:05:00] best as we can. And, um, I would assume that with alpaca, um, you, you didn't go that far because people weren't, you weren't directly paying you for that, so on. Yeah, but also like,
[00:05:13] Bartek: uh, the community around alpaca is not that big.
It was all mostly our internal thing that few people outside of this book happened to use. So, uh, if we don't answer something or we don't fix it, no one is [00:05:30] going to actually do it. So even besides licensing stuff and other thing, it was just like a very niche thing. And just
[00:05:39] Willem: because I'm sure, I'm sure though, if you would've chosen to commercialize Alpac at some point and you, you would've been paid to build a community, you, you would've succeeded doing that.
But that's, that's a different focus. I, This is an interesting, this is an interesting topic because that leads us into, uh, [00:06:00] Filip. Um, You built fuel storefront from agency and then detached that from the agency. So fuel storefront become, became completely separate from your agency. Um, how did
[00:06:14] Kalen: that, I have to ask, how did that, I have, I have to jump in real quick.
I have to jump in. I have to ask Phillip as by far, the most famous person currently on the podcast. How has the Forbes cover changed your [00:06:30] life? Are you fighting off the girls left and right? What, what's Hap Bartek said that he thought you were gonna get a cover of the magazine and pa and put it on the back of your wall so that everybody could see it in all your meetings.
I, I don't see, I don't see that, but
[00:06:45] Filip: yeah, so it turns out it's not so easy to print, print something that is that big because my goal was basically to remove this couch so I have, you know, the all white canvas and then put the whole cover in their. [00:07:00] So every time someone is calling me and just, you know, sitting here.
So the fact is visible, just giving them five, 10 seconds to really like, look at this, look at the store, appreciate it, and then starting the conversation. So that was my plan, waiting for that by not, I know it never have. Yeah. It's a
[00:07:23] Willem: word environment's. That's so funny because John, John u had this very big, uh, like bus stop size, uh, [00:07:30] poster from Meet Magento uk.
He was a speaker there and he took that home and I think his wife put it on the front door of her house at some point. It was a couple of years ago. It was super funny. Like you, you, you kept seeing pictures, uh, pop up from, from John, where, where is, um, MAGA poster was? Um, it was funny. It's kind of a mean, mean thing,
[00:07:55] Kalen: but, But how, but how, um, how, how is how, [00:08:00] like, I was, it, obviously it must have been exciting to, to get the Forbes thing.
How's all that? Um, have you been like, how's, how's everything going? How's everything going in general? Uh, Phillip, just overall, you
[00:08:14] Filip: know, like I, I wasn't invited to Machu before, so I considered that
[00:08:22] Kalen: This is one of the biggest podcasts. Mitch Talk .
[00:08:28] Filip: Oh yeah. This is called [00:08:30] Mato. You have too many things.
[00:08:31] Kalen: Uh, I know, I know too many interest things and they,
[00:08:35] Filip: they're all called very similarly.
[00:08:37] Kalen: I, very, very similar. I know, I know. It's, it's a bit of a problem.
[00:08:40] Bartek: Did you heard about Commerce Heroes, ?
[00:08:44] Filip: Yeah, I heard.
And that was, that actually had a different name, but I also heard that right now on Mata you basically have almost the same thing except it's like a secondary feature.
[00:08:54] Kalen: Yeah. and it's for Yeah, . Pretty much, pretty much. [00:09:00] Uh, but fellow, what the hell man? How's everything going with you storefront? What's the,
[00:09:04] Filip: Yeah, let me, let me, let me answer all of your questions because you keep ask, asking them.
So regarding for 13, Under 13, of course it changed my life. The girls are texting every day. Like the truth is that there was like one that texts on the Instagram, uh, and it was my girlfriend. So like, such a huge success. I was invited, uh, to the party of first 30, under 30, uh, it [00:09:30] was on Wednesday, two weeks ago.
So like every party on Wednesday it finished I think around 10. So I was driving four hours to war stall to be like three hours on the party. Then I was driving four hours back. So was it worth it? I don't know. We were seeing the future network
[00:09:47] Willem: worth was the party in Wasaw, so it wasn't Poland to party.
[00:09:50] Filip: Yes, yes. The party was in Warsaw. Uh, it was in Poland, like in the capital of Poland. For those who don't know, in general, I have to travel to [00:10:00] Warsaw a lot recently, either for some flights because there are no direct flight from those who have are, and it's just faster to go there because the flights right now, even from the short route, they're extremely expensive.
But, you know, I'm going by train and this is extremely, extremely, extremely. Way of transportation when you have to work? Honestly, I'm just entering the train, opening my laptop, closing my laptop, and I'm there. So I don't really [00:10:30] feel like it's traveling. What else? Oh, that's cool. The company is doing good.
We did some good tires like Bartek, for example. Uh, like doing the cats Are health healthy? I mean, both are healthy. I have two cats. So one cat is like the primary one, the one we hold off. The second one. The one that was for a year in my parents' house, in my girlfriend's parents' house, uh, because we forgot
[00:10:55] Kalen: to That's the fallback fall.
Yeah, the primary, primary cat fallback, [00:11:00] failover,
[00:11:01] Filip: I think. Yeah. It's the second cast, like very low maintenance. We try to do some things with him just in case the first cat you get lost or, or die. But in general, you know, it's, it's not a primary cat. , let's be honest. ,
[00:11:16] Bartek: you are going to check the shoes next morning to see if there is nothing in there.
I believe. Like, just listen to you right now and thinking what, what, what's, uh, evil [00:11:30] thing can do for Tia? Oh,
[00:11:32] Filip: I hope understand me. Really? Like, sometimes I feel they do because whenever I'm, you know, on a couch looking some stupid stuff about my cats, they're looking at me and they, they have this look that they know, but they never know if they know, but.
I, I haven't
[00:11:49] Bartek: signal they know anyways.
[00:11:51] Kalen: Plotting
[00:11:53] Filip: and how is stuff?
[00:11:55] Bartek: My cat is doing fine. It's right now 14 years old, [00:12:00] No diseases or any other signs of being old and really running or crazy looking. Always as good as, as day one. So
[00:12:11] Filip: I'm watching, doing Instagram actually. So you are taking your cat for a walk without leash, right?
[00:12:18] Bartek: Yeah, indeed. That's true. My, my cat is walking like a duck. , I started
[00:12:23] Kalen: Take You take your cat for a walk.
[00:12:27] Bartek: Yeah. But like, not like in a [00:12:30] kilometers away, but I live in like a very, uh, like super close to some trees and other stuff. So basically outside of the fence, I Right have, uh, area where I can walk with with them.
So it's perfectly fine. Of course. Like it's still a cat. It, it's not like, uh,
[00:12:49] Kalen: Do people look you like you're a psychopath when you walk
[00:12:53] Bartek: by with you? Yeah. But it's like a, Isn't that the normal look that people look at you? So,
[00:12:59] Willem: but do you [00:13:00] walk with or without a leash? With the cats? Without, without, without a
[00:13:04] Kalen: leash.
Oh,
[00:13:06] Willem: damn. But you, but in the beginning you had a leash didn. , like when it, I tried,
[00:13:12] Bartek: but it's super, super hard. So I just learned her to, to do this without, and it, it kind of works.
[00:13:20] Willem: And does she fetch sticks? Can you throw sticks for her? Does she fetch them?
[00:13:25] Bartek: Unfortunately not , but there, there are other [00:13:30] perks of having a cat that just walk by the, So to run on some stuff, jump over it and other things and
[00:13:38] Kalen: yeah.
So Phillip, you said that you started walking your cat too?
[00:13:44] Filip: Yeah, I put a mistake. I mean, so we started walking our cat when I think the cat was like five, six months old. Its pretty early. And right now she's demanding this. So every day we have to walk her. Otherwise our life is [00:14:00] hell. Really? , she's meowing all the time, jumping on different parts of, uh, Basically everywhere, jumping, screaming, uh, coming to, to me, looking at my eyes telling, you know, I want to be walked.
Basically, the cat is all over the place. You always hear it, you always hear it jumping somewhere, breaking something. It's, it's terrible. So that was a mistake from this perspective because right now I basically have a cut [00:14:30] and the duties of, uh, duck owner. But at the same time, it's pretty nice thing to do.
I mean, we started with a, with a, with a leaf. Right Now the we trust cut enough to do it without, and we are not working by forest. I mean, we live in a city and there's like this huge circle of buildings and in the middle you have something like, I don't know how it's called like court art or something like this.
Yeah. Where we basically have, uh, trash beans and uh, some [00:15:00] things so kids can play. And this is where, where we walk the cat, like mostly my girlfriend and everyone there already knows her. Of course, every time she meets someone it's like, Oh, you have a cat? Yes, I have a cat. And Right, everyone knows the cat.
So when the cat runs away, the people from the windows upstairs, they're even calling my girlfriend saying She's here, she's here, she's here. Really? But the cat is, That's cool
[00:15:24] Kalen: right now. Ah, that's
[00:15:25] Bartek: awesome. So the question is, who is well, like, uh, [00:15:30] who them know better you because was it Forbes or your cats because just it's walking
[00:15:35] Filip: outside.
Well, definitely the cats. Definitely the cats .
[00:15:39] Willem: So how does a process work when you get selected for Forbes? Um, Do they, like, how do they find you?
[00:15:48] Kalen: Okay, so is trying to figure out how to reverse Will is trying to figure out how to reverse it. ,
[00:15:55] Bartek: you need to be under
[00:15:55] Willem: I'm 36. I'm, I'm 36. I'm, I'm, I have no angle here.
[00:16:00] Just curiosity.
[00:16:02] Filip: Yeah, this, this is the first thing I wanted to say. Like, you're too old. But if they will ever have like 100, under 100, then you can, uh, you can apply. And honestly, it's not hard. I think probably in every country it's a little bit different or the European one or the world one is a little bit different.
But in our case, last year they invited me and I didn't get there. Mm-hmm. this year I sent it on myself and I got there. So the [00:16:30] first one is don't, uh, if they invite you just pass, they'll be next year. And then apply. Just send what you did. And that was it. I just sent a document and they replied and that was the whole problem.
[00:16:44] Willem: So this is the local, so this is, uh, was this Europe or po.
[00:16:50] Filip: Uh, it is Poland. It is for Poland. Ah, so ev this is what I think, like, it could be easy be different for different countries. And even when I was [00:17:00] talking with the guy that is in charge of this, he said that it looks like it would be different elsewhere.
For example, in Poland until this year, you are actually able to be there year after year. And there was one person that was there for six years in a row. So it's little bit like mad, less , less Interesting.
[00:17:22] Willem: Interesting alumni. Yeah.
[00:17:26] Kalen: That's funny. Um,
[00:17:29] Willem: cool. So [00:17:30] can we go back to my initial question Okay. Then, or
[00:17:33] Kalen: Yes.
Yes, sir. We can do it. Let's, let's go back to it. I don't remember what it was, but we can get back
[00:17:38] Willem: to it. It was the journey from DeFonte. So that's the. That's the, the agency that, uh, Philip came from. Um, are you completely out of Devonte now? Uh, Philip? Yeah. Okay. So you're the,
[00:17:54] Filip: I mean, like, so one of, one of the goals that we had when we are creating a [00:18:00] separate entity was to don't have Devonte on the cup table to not be related to Devonta more than to any other partner agency because we knew that it is essential for a healthy partner ecosystem.
Like no one would really like to go full into this storefront if they will know that officially or unofficially they are supporting the competitor, Right? So this is why it also took a lot of time, because I think together with Bart, uh, our third co-founder that with Patrick, we met, uh, in January [00:18:30] and we told ourselves, Okay, so we'll have a terra sheet on the table and a separate entity in March.
It happened in November. And, you know, during, during that time, we are very close to quit. I mean, it's not easy, it's not easy to spin out the company from other company that already have a lot of shareholders. They all have different interests and honestly, like, you know, something like this, so is the last thing they would care about.
Uh, they have a lot of other [00:19:00] stuff, and still you have to reach out to like a c level people, et cetera, persuade them to give you like a specific amount of first, uh, why it's good for the company, why they should actually give it away, et cetera, et cetera. It's, it's a long process and especially when the company that this shareholder is not very fluent, let's call it like this, in the startup world or knowledgeable, it's like, you know, breaking, breaking the stone really, [00:19:30] because you have to explain a lot of things.
You have to do a lot of persuasion and you have to do for all of them. But it happened. It happened because Barts and Patrick, they really put a lot of sweat into this. And finally in November we turned off, we signed the papers at the same day. We actually were, uh, accepted by a Combinator. So it was a pretty good day, though.
I don't remember the exact date. I think it was 10th of November, Like one of the last days of November. Yeah. [00:20:00] How
[00:20:00] Kalen: was, why Combinator? Uh, sorry. Well, and this is one of the downsides of doing a multi-person podcast is it's virtually impossible to get your questioning straight. It's a bit of a nightmare, but, um, so apologies in advance.
But, um, but Phil, how was, how was Y Combinator for. ?
[00:20:19] Filip: Well, the truths, we were, I think in the first remote batch during Covid. So we didn't have this amazing experience of going to [00:20:30] Silicon Valley. Ah, okay. Um, getting drunk. We followed them, you know, like having a drink of Michael Sibel. We didn't have that. It was all online.
I think they did everything they could to actually have model as the same experience. So there was a lot of networking. Like they splitted us into groups to make sure that, you know, we are, we are still talking with each other and we know each other. The groups were mixing from time to time. So I, I think they did what they could, but it was not like a full y, [00:21:00] convenient or experience.
Mm-hmm. Also, what I think is that Y Combinator is the best for the like very, very, very early stage startups at that time. We had some kind of a business model. We already had customers. , Uh, we already had pretty good traction and when we were talking with most of the startups in our batch, they didn't have that.
They were either having the first customers or thinking about how to monetize, et cetera, and the content because they, they had like three miles of lectures, like all the time. Really, Like [00:21:30] every day you had to, you had to spend some time for this. If you didn't, you had recordings, but they were teaching you everything about finding a startup, running, marketing, doing few weeks, I would call it like a very good startup would come, but at the same time, a lot of things that they taught there, we were not able to relate because we are kind of past that period already, but still.
[00:21:51] Willem: So it's so they, so they invest in your company and then they give you coaching and they demand some stuff from [00:22:00] you to work on certain aspects of your business plan or, and they help you with the marketing and stuff you say? Are they still, are they still, uh, are they still involved now or is that a temporary thing that you already have passed?
[00:22:18] Filip: They're still involved. I mean, they're not, uh, with me doing
so, they're not [00:22:30] actively involved and, or proactively involved. But whenever we need something, we know that we can count on the Y Combinator, uh, network and, you know, we are just coming to them asking questions. Sometimes they're making us an intro, sometimes they're just ask answering directly. So it's useful.
It's really useful and I think, you know, it's probably gonna be useful on all the stages though. It's mostly useful on, on this very early stage when you don't know anyone, you don't have your own network of advisors, et cetera. This is where [00:23:00] Y Combinator is really priceless. And this is where you cans.
Like really, really saves a lot of time on being this sort of stuff. If I would be a first time founder, I would definitely, I mean, I was a first time founder and I still are, but as a first time founder, I found it super valuable because you're alone in the dark. When you are running your first company, you have no idea what to do.
You have no idea what is good, what is Bath, what behavior is expected, what behavior is not expected, how, you know what, What [00:23:30] is the playbook for different departments? So this is what you are kind of learning during quite Combinator. Mm-hmm. and I found it super interesting, super useful. I did not remember everything, but even now, like these days, sometimes coming back to some of the things they said and right now I can relate to them.
So it's not only about the first stage, it's also about managing people. It's also about making tough choices, et cetera. Did you
[00:23:58] Kalen: meet some cool people? Like, [00:24:00] uh, as far as other in, in the network, like in the found in just in the founder network, did you connect with other peers and stuff like that?
[00:24:09] Filip: So this is something that Patrick is doing more often.
Like we didn't have a chance to directly, you know, connect with the coolest folks in the Y Combinator world. But, you know, we had meetings with her B Founders, we had meetings with Michael sbo. Uh, so we kind of scratched that surface. But again, it was a [00:24:30] remote track and that's like all into running a company because it was not, you know, it wasn't like we took three months off from running a company and right now we're in the university mode.
We're still starting everything and last after our fundraising. So networking, I, I would say was the last thing we're thinking about at that time. Right. Survival.
[00:24:51] Kalen: That makes sense. More important. Yeah. . That makes sense. That makes sense. So it wasn't, it very much wasn't the classic y [00:25:00] Combinator experience on basically every, every level.
Um, yeah. That's cool, man. That's so impressive. Yeah. That's, that's super cool, man. That guys got into that. Um,
[00:25:13] Willem: how long, how long ago was it that, uh, that they, that they got involved?
[00:25:21] Filip: How long the decision making process was for them?
[00:25:24] Willem: No, when, Well, you said it happened in November with, uh, Y Combinator. What, what year was [00:25:30] that?
Uh, so two years ago,
[00:25:33] Filip: 21, if I remember. Yes. And we were in winter 2021. But,
[00:25:43] Willem: and, um, and you, you, you grew quite a bit over the past since then, I think, right? How, how many people are you now?
[00:25:52] Filip: So when we are joining quite co, there was basically a founding team. So three founders close, one person doing marketing and [00:26:00] all the marketing related things.
One person for, two people for software development. So there were six of us. Right now there are study a little bit more than 100 after why we than two years. So it's pretty big. It's pretty big. And of course it's extremely challenging. Like I also don't think that, you know, you should think about the greatness of the company from the perspective of how many people are there.
Because we're a startup, we got three tons of money and you can literally be even 500 right [00:26:30] now, but Right. That's just not what, what counts. Like ultimately the revenue, the ability to close another round, this is what counts.
[00:26:38] Kalen: So yeah, it can be easy to focus on the head count A as one of the. Signals, but that can be, that can be more or less meaningful.
I mean, the moment you hired Bartech automatically that became less meaningful. That's right.
[00:26:58] Willem: Because he's a 10 time programmer. [00:27:00] Right. And he only comes for one officially. That's right. That's why. That's right. This was a compliment. Yeah, we, except
[00:27:07] Bartek: that I'm not coding at
[00:27:08] Willem: all.
[00:27:09] Filip: Like Yeah. But we over hired, like we hired Bartek, we had no idea He's 10 x, so we kind of like lower his salary and talking an indigenous five x.
So right now Bartek is not coding. He's pairing the remain five x for something else.
[00:27:26] Bartek: Uh, just drawing mainly and wasting time. [00:27:30]
[00:27:30] Willem: Yeah. You do have a lot of time to spend on. . I, I must and Slack , but it's good
it's nice to speed in, which the speed in which us for, well, Kalin Mrs. Slows one because he disableds notifications. But as soon as Kalin posts something that we want to respond to, it's within five minutes that we're all free. , [00:28:00] we all free jumping.
[00:28:01] Kalen: I think that, I think Philip had mentioned that you do a Pomodoro um, workflow where you'll go into the zone for like an hour at a time and then you'll check Twitter when you come out.
Um, I had done some, uh, I have experimented with different things like that over, you know, over the, over the years. I think that's a good, um, is that, does that work pretty well for you?
[00:28:25] Filip: Yes. Honestly, I had a lot of issues with productivity [00:28:30] when I started to become, when I started to be a cto, because we could imagine that my calendar very soon became full of meetings and I really, really didn't have any, any focus time.
So the, this, those short periods when I had this time, I was also, I was using for modern because otherwise there will be 20 things that will come at me and I will try to focus on everything and I will focus on nothing because I'll be responding, et cetera. Yeah. So at the very a day, it helped me a lot to actually, because how I, how I work with modern [00:29:00] is I don't have like 40 minutes for 20 minutes of break or something like that.
Yeah. I have 40 minutes focused, 20 minutes of responding on Slack, Twitters all others, and then coming back to the zone for 14 minutes and it works very. Right now I'm a little bit further from the engineering tasks, which also freaked a lot of my calendar. So I would say right now I'm working like a regular person that can work for like four or five hours straight without having to jump in into a call.
And [00:29:30] right now it's even more effective. But what I learned is that you can't really Domo or whatever a very long time. I mean, it's, I'm doing breaks. I'm doing it for like two, three weeks, then I'm doing a break trying to, you know, work. Normally whenever I see that I'm actually starting to procrastinate a little bit more because it kind of happens naturally.
Then I'm, you know, coming back to the commodor training my, uh, mind again and trying to, and it's never [00:30:00] ending cycle, you know,
[00:30:01] Kalen: who are Yeah. A never ending cycle of being what?
[00:30:07] Filip: Of being worse because I'm finishing the now, you know, everything is on the right track. I will be able to focus, I'll be super productive.
The things get worse and coming back to .
[00:30:18] Kalen: Yeah, Yeah. It's like, it's like, yeah. It's like those things definitely change over time and you'll try different things and some you'll have periods of being hyper productive and then you'll find yourself getting [00:30:30] distracted and then you'll have to try something else, and then, um, it kind of is, is constantly evolving.
Um, but what do you, um, Philip, what are you, what are you spending your time on these days? Um, are you, do you mentioned you're doing, you're less connected to engineering tasks and stuff?
[00:30:50] Filip: Yeah, so like, you know, the role of a founder is basically, usually, it depends of course, like what the software title.
But I would, I would [00:31:00] say if you're a founder, like one of your jobs is being a founder and being a founder is like jumping into different parts of, you know, your company and seeing where things don't work or where people maybe need a little bit of push or maybe they even need a little bit of guidance or actually involvement of a founder, which also matters a lot for the people.
Uh, and this is what I do as a founder, but I'm also working right now on the community team. And my job for the next quarter is basically to unfuck bottom up [00:31:30] approach. Uh, because when you have an office source company, and one of the things that are actually one of the main reasons why you are doing this as of source is so called bottom up approach.
So bottom up approach works in a way where you have top down. So the people from the top of the company, uh, they're making, uh, choices, they're making business decisions, and everyone of the bottom have to follow. Right? But you also have bottom up approach where someone from the engineering team, uh, someone from the architecture team is actually [00:32:00] bringing the storefront to the table when they're evaluating like what they want to use.
Mm-hmm. . And those people also have a high influence on, on those choices. So my goal right now is to make sure that, first of all, they have all around positive experience when they're interacting with our open source packages, with our office source repositories when they're on discards, and give them a little bit of weapons to actually persuade the people that [00:32:30] have this decision making, uh, power in the company to use storefront.
Because those people usually, and I think it's very common for technical people, because I also had that issue as. , they think a lot about like what, what they can do with this tool, uh, what possibilities it could bring. But they don't think that much about why, like what is the biggest purpose, what is the gain, et cetera, right?
Uh, so my goal is to help those people, to give them some p decks that they can [00:33:00] use to write a page, our documentation called Convincer Boss, which will give them good arguments to actually win this fight. Uh, and think a little bit from the business perspective, but from the technological perspective.
Because if you think, yeah, we can make things faster and it has this, this, and this feature, and we'll be doing class technical there, et cetera, it's like, try to tell to any business minded person things like that, and they won't understand the thing. And unfortunately, this is exactly how the business and tech [00:33:30] conversation happen in most of the companies and in most of the environments.
Like they speak to different languages. And right now I move from engineering to. Go to market team, I can, I can call it like that. Mm-hmm. . And the truth is I learned a lot. I really learned a lot. And my mind is even thinking a little bit differently because I was so focused on the initiatives and not so much on, maybe not the outcomes, but the underlying, uh, motivation for that.
Like, [00:34:00] going really deep into like, why we are doing this, not because other people have this and this is a good feature. Like, you know, the gold market team doesn't think this way. They think it should be differently. And right now my perspective is also broader. So I'm kind of trying to leverage this experience, think from the perspective of the developer before, and, you know, use this knowledge to actually arm our contributors and community members with, with this knowledge and teach them how to.
That's cool. Talk with the business personas. [00:34:30] That's really
[00:34:31] Willem: cool. What departments do you have in your company? So I've already heard mm-hmm. some now. Well, uh, how are those hundred people divided? Like what kind of teams? How, how did you build up and what, what, what team is BAK on a
[00:34:46] Bartek: trolling team?
[00:34:50] Filip: Barak is, is in, is in , right? Well, now the speeding, like, so we have this engineering and product team right now. They're working [00:35:00] together and they, we, we are right now making this differentiation. We didn't have that before. So before we just had engineering team. And engineering team was basically the team that took care of the community, staff of the product staff, of the engineering staff.
Right now we are dividing this a little bit. So we have product and engineering team and the product and engineering are divided. Uh, we have go-to-market team and under go-to-market team, we have like customer success. You have, uh, [00:35:30] community also. Community used to be part of the engineering. But what we notice is that if this is part of the engineering team, there is no way they're gonna collaborate with anyone from go to market because the community team is naturally closer to the developers always, and it's creating some kind of a silo.
So we move this team to the go-to market and honestly, in most of the organizations that they read about, it is under some kind of like a marketing team. So we have this go to market and we [00:36:00] also have operations. And operations is like everything else, like hr, bi, this sort of stuff. And it worked pretty well.
It worked pretty well. Probably it will work for some time, but you know, organizations are changing and we'll be probably more and more granular. Right now we are kind of switching from the organization of generalists to the organizational specialists. And this also reflected, uh, [00:36:30] in the organization charge.
[00:36:33] Willem: And how remote is everyone? Do you have a main office, right?
[00:36:37] Filip: No, I mean we have the main office, no one, like a co-working space and we have one of them with to us. So like if you happen to be in worse of invited, but in general, everyone of you work totally remotely. So we were remote first. From the first day we kind of didn't have a choice because it was during Covid and with a state like this.
And I think that was good. [00:37:00] That was very good because a lot of companies, when they're starting, they're thinking, Okay, right now we need an office. They're renting a flat, et cetera. We didn't even have, you know, to choose that because it was Covid, there was no point in having it. Mm-hmm. and we had to learn how to work remotely.
From the day one, there was no other choice and it stayed like this. Right now it's, it's kind of like a perk. But also we knew that if we want to create a global startup, we need to hire a lot of people globally. And it's very hard to do all of that in the Polish markets, especially when you want [00:37:30] to be like international company.
You need people from sales, but also from other departments to, to not be all in one country.
[00:37:40] Willem: Time zones.
[00:37:43] Filip: Yeah, that's a little bit challenging, but we try to, you know, we try to have teams that are from the same time zone if possible, and teams that are from mixed time zones. Like when we have people from different time zones, kind of try to put them in the, in the same team, if that's possible.[00:38:00]
Uh, what is challenging, especially that, you know, it's, we are not acing first. We try to, but it's, it's a long, long, long, long way. And sometimes this asynchronous communication is crucial and not for everyone. It works like we have some team leaders that clearly say that we don't want people from other time zones, but we even have team leaders that clearly say you don't have people from.
Uh, countries because having to speak English during our team [00:38:30] meetings, it makes communication harder. And in general, you know, we are in favor of such requests.
[00:38:37] Kalen: The ASIC first thing is interesting because I tend to, uh, as sometimes assume remote companies are super async. And I was even chatting a little bit with, with the, um, Major OS team about meeting structure and async versus synchronous meetings and stuff like that.
And, um, I mean, I think [00:39:00] that that's like probably a general best practice. Um, but uh, you know, I mean, it's non-trivial to actually do it. Like, especially with a certain size team and everything like that. Um, Do you? Yeah.
[00:39:22] Willem: If you, if you have regular meetings and you work together, you know all of the context of each other's work and you have like, you know, if [00:39:30] someone writes you a message, you more or less know what they mean if you, if it's outside of your business context.
So with the meetings of os, these are people all from different companies that don't see each other in person, often don't have meetings outside of the one that we plan every week or every two weeks. And then writing out messages takes so much longer than just having a 30 minute phone call because I can tell you, I can tell you stuff in 30 [00:40:00] minutes, that would take me longer than a day to ride out.
Um, because then I would think about, okay, so how does this come across? If I, if I write, Oh, I shouldn't write this like this because he will probably think I'm angry. Like, and if I talk to you and a and I tell it to you with a smile and a certain tone in my fo my voice, you don't need to think about how I mean something.
You know, I'm being
[00:40:22] Kalen: sarcastic. Yeah. I mean, I, I, I, I, like, I agree and I think reasons are, are the same reasons for [00:40:30] every group ever that has preferred meetings and has been used to meetings and had. Asynchronous won't work because of those reasons. And, um, I think that, um, and, and without getting in too much into the, the major OS stuff that we, we were talking about in Slack privately, this, this goes to the Magento Association stuff as well.
I see it as the same thing where they're like, Hey, let's, uh, great idea. Let's talk about that in our next meeting in four weeks. And it's like, Guys, let's ju [00:41:00] like, what exactly do you guys need for this website thing? Write it down. Uh, somewhere and let's, you know, get it. So I see that as another instance, like I of the same mindset and I, and, and I know there's reasons for it, and meetings can be good, obviously.
I mean, this is a meeting, we're doing a meeting right now, but, um, I don't know.
[00:41:23] Willem: I just, uh, I think when you're, when you're seeking alignment, then a phone call is much quick. Like you can decide on next, [00:41:30] next steps and then in between meetings you work the stuff out. But just if you don't have that alignment yet, it takes so much time to write out messages and find the alignment that way.
Um, so it doesn't, ideally also with the association, people would be working a lot in between meetings, so it's not just the meetings, but the meetings are crucial just to, to get a common understanding within the group. And that's, that takes so much more [00:42:00] time and energy if you do it in synchrony.
[00:42:02] Kalen: It just occurred to me that, uh, we have not brought up yet the, the topic for the episode, which is the mock alliance, uh, which makes , which I think we're talking about associations and stuff like that.
But Philip, you were recently added to the, the, the mock alliance. How's that? How's that going? And, and, and, and maybe I don't understand it too well, but, um, is that been, um, how, how's, how's all that going for you? [00:42:30] Um,
[00:42:31] Filip: this is another, a question I was waiting for, but I'm glad that you didn't ask that yet. So, , I mean, I was part of Mahalia, I was part of Mahalia for a very long fight because this surf front was one of 10 or 11 companies that was actually like a founding members of Gu Mahaas we're not, They was founding it, but we were there at the moment of announcing it.
Uh, and right now I was just invited to the tech [00:43:00] council and. In the tech council, we have around 50, 60 people. So that's a lot. Really? That's a lot. Even though right now they're making some changes. So right now they're making kind of like a tiers in the council. So there are people who want to be much more involved, spent like two, three hours a week, and they are kind of in the court team, and you have other people that just want to be stay, stay updated, that want to be able to express their opinion of some strategic things, but they don't have [00:43:30] time to commit to three hours a week to actually work on my alliance.
Mm-hmm. , I plan to be the core team member because mm-hmm. , what I, what I see in general, and it's not only about Mark, it's not only about headless, but in general in our space, like web development space, it is very much high driven. So there is all those buzzwords that we are using to actually call the next big thing.
Which are either like a subset of the previous big thing or [00:44:00] exactly the same thing, but a little bit between names. Yeah. Don't mention
[00:44:03] Kalen: composable commerce in front of Willem. He'll start, he'll start
[00:44:06] Willem: twitching. That's the C and ma, right? . I was just thinking MA stands for monolithic application.
[00:44:20] Filip: commerce, Exactly. Monolithic applications Carefully. Uh,
[00:44:26] Willem: I don't know. Handpicked, So is it [00:44:30] micro architecture? No, Micro. Micro
[00:44:34] Kalen: microservices. API based, composable,
[00:44:38] Filip: composable, and headless. Not composable. It's actually cloud. Oh, right, right, right, right, right. So composable got, uh, under headless because headless is kind of like a broader term and composable is basically Okay.
So we have a head lesser, but we also have sheet tons of different services that you have to somehow glue. Together. Right. So this is, this is when you think composable. You think [00:45:00] composable when at the back of your package you like, Oh shit, there's so much of those services. I can't plug them into the front end.
So this is where you have a composable stack. Like the easiest way to,
[00:45:10] Kalen: to my, I have a question that we already composable. I have question. Yeah. I have a question that might be an interesting for you for, uh, Willam and, and Philip to chime in on the compo and especially Philip from the perspective of things being buzzwordy.
So composable commerce, right? Like I talked to Will, I think Willam and I talked about this on a podcast. He said, Listen, Magento's been composable forever. [00:45:30] When you think about from the perspective of you're gonna plug in a shipper HQ for your shipping, you're gonna plug in, da da, da, da, different things, uh, um, different SaaS, uh, options, maybe you're gonna plug in a checkout, whatever.
Um, whereas from the kind of more pure composable commerce perspective, I'd imagine it's a little different, right? But I kind of can see his argument. Um, so how, I guess the way I would phrase the question is, Philip, how would you, how is, what's an example of [00:46:00] composability that the William's definition of plugging sass into Magento doesn't fit?
Um, you know, does that, does that question make sense? I'm trying to kind of get at. What is the, what are we talking about? What exactly is composable is not composable.
[00:46:19] Filip: Okay. So this, this may sound like, uh, I'm very good at setting what my company's in, but yes, mon can also be composable [00:46:30] and this is what we are almost looking for a lot, lot of times really.
So I think we have, we have some problems in our industry. So when we have a world like composable or headless and they are kinda a new waves that are highlighting some specific way of building software, a lot of people try to attribute a monopoly to this particular way of building software. To this new term, and this is the problem because a lot of things can be composable, legal can [00:47:00] be composable, like monolith can be composable.
A headless application can also be composable and in general, when we mean composable, we extreme composable like Thea, where you have a lot of services, you need a specific orchestration layer, but you also want to the couple, But it doesn't mean that you can compose in monolith, that you can compose it in any other architecture.
You can really, it's not a problem at all. The same way like when you have a magenta store, you can really talk to the aps of different [00:47:30] platforms. You don't have to manually out any kind of like PHP rendering or this sort of stuff, and any PHP client for that. Right, Right. It's only about like the extreme use case and like this perfect use case, and it's not about having monopoly on this particular feature.
It's more about being the best at this particular thing. So composable is great when you have, you know, a lot of services when you need other services because your [00:48:00] business is so big. That's a small changes in the workflow or small changes on the front end. They will make a huge difference when it's come to the revenue.
This is where you need that. But at the same time, you could also have your Magento store. You can plug in five or six or seven different APIs and you're still composing. But this is just not the main reason why you chose Magento or why you chose composable. You're choosing composable to have this flexibility to know that your biggest pain [00:48:30] point would be gluing all of those things.
This is where, when you're choosing them, when you're, you know, your biggest pain point would be somewhere else. You would probably choose Amli. Mm-hmm. .
[00:48:44] Willem: I think the, um, the difference is if you as a company decide to go the ma away, or if you're really, if you approach your architecture from composable standpoint, you end up with something different [00:49:00] than probably something different than a monolith that has a lot of services plugged into it.
Because if you're going to Mawa and that's woven through your. your whole business. And, and it's not just your eCommerce layer, but it's throughout the whole business, and you try to have all of your systems work independently. Um, and, uh, yeah, you need a glue to, to put that together. And, and Magento can be that glue to put things together, um, but [00:49:30] could still be that all of your services are composable.
It's just the only difference is that if you would use magenta for that in a monolithic way, that your front end might not be hatless. Um, so it could or could not be hatless. So, um, it's more like the general approach from a, as a, as a business perspective. Uh, you could be composable minded and work that all the way through your, your, your business or not, but [00:50:00] the monolith still fits into that ideology.
But perhaps helpless is set more sensible if your company's also. separating your development, for example. So if, if you have development, uh, team that likes to work with JavaScript and are super effective in, in those technologies, you can separate them out from the guys that are doing the backend work.
You could outsource the backend work and do the front end work in house or whatever. [00:50:30] Um, but yeah, for, for every argument you give, I, I'm always almost tempted to make the counter argument. Like you could probably still also do that with Magento. You could have a front end team working on Magento separate from the front, the backend team.
Um, so this continue, this discussion can continue on am endlessly. Um, but um, Yeah, it's, it's, it's interesting, uh, movement in the market. The, the, the mock thing. I
[00:50:58] Bartek: think I would add one thing [00:51:00] that I believe is true in most cases, the composable with the headless in the mark way is usually that anywhere in your architecture, you don't have a single point of failure.
Like sometimes some service that is well , but middle worst, but you make middle worse, usually not stateless, not, not stateful. They're just passing some, [00:51:30] some network. So the chances that someone, something goes south in diarrhea are relatively low because it's just like a, a bit more smarter
[00:51:39] Filip: practice. Yeah.
Like the, the comp, like the noncom composable way, I would call it like a very pla putting centric, and the eCommerce platform is center of the universe. If this goes down, like nothing would work well in composable. You theoretically you can put, you know, a houseman algorithm [00:52:00] that some of the services and just some of the features will not work.
[00:52:04] Willem: So if you're shipping provider goes down, hatless still works. If your pricing, if your pricing system, if you're, of course it
[00:52:13] Bartek: depends how well designed it is, but if that's just a full
[00:52:18] Kalen: or something. Actually, I, I have a question on that because the shipping something is, the shipping thing is something I was curious about to it as well as.
From a question of composability, are people actually. [00:52:30] Swapping out or putting in fallback, uh, providers for things like shipping. Like do you, um, because that's where I think to myself, well, whether you're monolith or composable, if you're relying on one shipping thing, the shipping goes down, you're kind of screwed.
But do you guys see it where people will have a fallback shipping provider if, if, if one shipping provider API goes down? Or is that still so, Uh,
[00:52:55] Bartek: because it's just probably related to writing [00:53:00] some agreements and paying stuff, so yeah, you are usually tight to Right. Some service that is, I never for you.
But also it's very, depends on the. I believe in Europe is not that common, that shipping providers actually doing a lot. Mm-hmm. because like if you are shipping within a single country at a single rate mm-hmm. , uh, you don't need to check the addresses and other stuff. Right. The billing is usually like static thing.
So even if [00:53:30] the provider goes down, it's on your eCommerce site. That extra valley can retry and eventuality make this shipping happen, right? So
[00:53:41] Filip: depends person, like the, the truth is I never saw that personality and I also don't see any reason to do that.
[00:53:50] Kalen: Be just because the shipping providers are used generally stable enough that it's not a, it's not enough of a prior.
I mean,
[00:53:57] Filip: for all almost, or I think [00:54:00] every enterprise level agreement that you're signing, you have some decent level of sla and I don't think anyone in the enterprise world will buy anything that doesn't have like, at least free lines. Yeah, that makes sense. I get fishing, et cetera. Like there's literally no way that it would break so much.
That makes sense that your store will be unusable. Yeah. That makes,
[00:54:22] Kalen: I've seen FedEx go down. Yeah, I was just say like the, the, the sa and then if FedEx goes down, sometimes [00:54:30] obviously the shipping provider can wrap some logic around that and stuff like that, but, and these SaaS companies are getting more and more mature to the point where they're offering those terms and those uptime guarantees and stuff like that.
I guess the thing I, I, I, I struggle to wrap my head around is if we're talking about composability, we're talking about swap it in, swap it out, change it, whatever. If the, if the SAS that you're composing or plugging in, if you're never. I mean, if you're not, if it's not easy to change that because of [00:55:00] the terms you have, because you're paying for it, because your team is relying on the interface and the functionality of that SaaS, then what, what do we mean when we say that you can easily swap them in and out If in practice you're not gonna, like, you're not gonna switch out clavio very often.
You're very often you're not gonna switch out. You know, like that's the thing I'm trying to wrap my head around. Uh, Philip, I'm curious. But
[00:55:26] Bartek: yeah, I would say the different parts are designed to be, [00:55:30] to be changed easier than shipping, payment and other stuff, because that's kinda the foundation of the business.
What your usual changing is the technical stuff more related to what, for example, administration is doing. So for example, you are going to change the CMS platform to something different because have the feature that, for example, marketing team might need . And in that scenario it's most [00:56:00] likely easier to do than putting it outside of demo
[00:56:04] Filip: olive.
Yes, exactly. So you have a little bit or much less tight coupling. And when you're switching e-commerce, it's, for example e-commerce, it's the responsibilities are not as wide as before. So it's not like you're front end whole backend and basically center of the universe usually is just some kind of a skeleton that is used to plug in some other third party services or sometimes it's only about making an order or something like [00:56:30] that.
Right. So that's the beauty. That's the beauty of this composability. But at the same time, You know, every vendor, sooner or later they will be trying to look into their ecosystem. They will try to enforce a vendor lock. So there is also a lot of vendors that are actually kind of like gluing all the other things, but they have things like internal fields that they're adding to the data format for the integration.
This is some kind of a tight captain already right now, but it's still, I would say [00:57:00] of course, it really depends on the product, but it's still much less than you were used to with monoliths.
[00:57:06] Kalen: Yeah, that makes sense. It's a funny dynamic with all these SaaS companies because they're becoming more and more mature.
They're becoming bigger, right? Economically, they're becoming stronger. They're building out their own partner ecosystems. I mean, you look at the clavio partner ecosystem, right? They've got more and more, uh, entrenched interest and vendor lock in, uh, because essentially they're doing a good job at building their [00:57:30] business.
So, so that, it's funny because we're talking, you're talking about composability, which essentially means how easy is it to change one vendor for another, where the vendors are becoming more and more entrenched just by the nature of the fact they're doing a good job as a vendor. So it's an interesting kind of like tension.
[00:57:50] Filip: But you know, Caleb, like you could have composability and vendor looking at the same time. It's not like the only purpose of composability is not that you're not [00:58:00] not locked into, uh, an ecosystem of a particular vendor. It's more about flexibility to change things sometimes to the things for, from the same vendor, sometimes not to work on them parallelly, et cetera.
Right? So we see that a lot of companies, and one of them is slowly becoming even commerce tools that they have. This had less, let's call it, uh, or API first backend. And then they're also buying a bunch of services that integrated with them away well, So they have their own, uh, payment gateway, [00:58:30] they have their lcms, et cetera.
They still APA first, but you're plugging in are basically steel services from the same vendor. And I think this is alright. This is alright, as long as you have this flexibility to actually change different parts of your system.
[00:58:50] Bartek: You're muted, Philip.
[00:58:51] Kalen: Oh yeah, you're muted. Sorry.
[00:58:55] Filip: Oh, no, when, when that happened, you're back. You're back technically, Yeah. A [00:59:00] second. Okay. Because imagine you have, uh, you have so many different vendors. You are in a space that is completely new, so there are no vendors rising. Some of them are banqueting, some of them are getting acquired.
It's a risky space to be, and some of the pricings, they could change, some of the tariffs and conditions they could change. Some products could change. You really need this flexibility in the new space. It's much, much safer actually, to invest into something like [00:59:30] this and know that, Oh, if I made this decision wrong, it's not gonna cost me writing everything.
I also like to, you know, to, to think about this from this perspective. there, there are always a lot of benefits with, uh, being currently a doctor or right now, even not an early adopter, but in general buying kin to a new technology. But at the same time, one of the risk is that it's so changing, uh, that every decision that you make should be more or less [01:00:00] reversible.
Mm-hmm. ,
[01:00:02] Bartek: So I'm, It's fine.
[01:00:04] Kalen: Yeah, go ahead. Well, go ahead.
[01:00:06] Willem: Yeah. Just as we, we talked about this before, uh, Philip and I, um, that, um, the, the goal of, of composable is inter interchangeability of systems, but in practice with, with any system, you see that data so specific to the implementation, that swapping it out directly is a really big challenge.
[01:00:30] And unless you have a normalized data set, so you would. Any external CMS has these attributes and they are post-it category, you know, go on and on, and you have all of that defined, and all of those content systems need to follow that data set only then you can just swap between systems. But now if you, the, the challenge is migrating your data from, from one CMS to the [01:01:00] other, and then reimplementing the glue, as you call this with composable, like you need to redo the, the integration or the, the, the, the data mapping between your third party CMS and.
And your own implementation. So that's still, I think that's the promise of composable, but that's still today. Um, as big of a challenge as with, with the monolith. Like you need to rewrite stuff, you need to reimplement if you wanna swap [01:01:30] out one system. And it's kind of a dream. I I, I said earlier, . If you've ever integrated a E R P system with a commerce system, um, and you try to, um, make that as global, that it can be reused, you will find out that it's, it's nearly impossible to make a universal adaptor for A E R P because everyone has different products, different data sets, different integrations, and, uh, that, that's just [01:02:00] like, that takes months and months and months to integrate usually, especially at that size where, where composable is targeting.
So, um,
[01:02:07] Bartek: and most likely it will never happen. It's really hard to define something like unified data model that will be the same for Shopify and SEP for example. It's like Spectrum is so wide that like the platform exists because they're different. They're not like doing all of the [01:02:30] same. And that, that's where, where the difference come from.
[01:02:33] Filip: Mm-hmm. . And we tried that. We really tried that. We tried that with this front one. We are trying to adjust everything into like one common format, the MAO format. It didn't work with this front two, we initially tried to just have some kind of like a more free abstract format. It also didn't work with, uh, a product that Bartek is doing.
We also tried, and as far as I know, it also didn't work. And, but I also don't think like this universality of having Plug and [01:03:00] places is what composable is about. You don't aim to have this plug and play experience that does aim for lighter Co and also mm-hmm. , You know, when, when you're talking about co you want to be coupled with the things that are actually more universal, like front end, like the orchestration layer, you know, their features, they probably won't change that much and they are pretty universal.
While all the backend services that have a very nuanced features and the very nuanced behavior, pricing, et cetera, this is something [01:03:30] that we want to have little bit more decoupled. So it's also about new moving this epicenter of your software from the eCommerce platform to the orchestration layer on the front end.
[01:03:41] Kalen: Seems like, uh, the middleware, these middleware layers I keep hearing about are, uh, maybe going to wrap these things up. Like if you have a middleware that can, that can know, that can, um, you know, like the vendors, the vendors are never [01:04:00] gonna, are, are never gonna, um, uh, all agree on universal data, uh, models.
But I think that Middlewares can do that themselves. And then as different middlewares become more popular and widely adopted, they'll have more and more incentive to, to go in and map data fields, uh, intelligently to some kind of a standard. Um, I, I still don't think I understood the example, Philip, that you were giving, where you were saying you can have vendor lock in and composability at the same time.
Um, [01:04:30] I, I know you mentioned commerce tools and how. Acquiring services to plug in. But, um, could you ex, could you explain that to me one more time? Like I'm five , How can you have vendor lockin and composability? I think
[01:04:44] Filip: the easiest way would be to say, Okay, so here we have orchestration layer here you have all of our services and we're integrated with all of those services.
If you want to use something else, you can do this. But you have to manually integrate and you have to adjust [01:05:00] into our own formats. And this is exactly what SAP's particles is doing. For example, I was in the core team of SAP's particles for I think six months. Uh, I was like, like foundations for this project together with a lot of other amazing engineers.
And one of the things that they are doing is actually, yes, you have had, this right now is fully composable, but at the same time, when you want to integrate anything that is not from sap, you have to integrate it in a way that fits into this SAP api. So this is [01:05:30] the easiest example I can give.
[01:05:33] Kalen: Okay, so you're still locked into sap or you're still locked into Commerce tools, uh, as a, as a base.
But then you can plug, you can use some of their services for specific services or you can use other, other vendors. It's
[01:05:47] Filip: small. Yes, exactly. It's just about making our services so easy to use that it's a scene not to do this and using other as hard as possible.
[01:05:59] Kalen: [01:06:00] Okay. That makes sense. That makes sense. All right.
I appreciate you explaining that . Um, nice, nice surprise. Willing. I would like
[01:06:11] Willem: to go on for another, Our, because I think still a lot of interesting things we could talk about, but I kind of had a heart cut off 15 minutes ago, , I'm honest.
[01:06:26] Filip: Fair enough. My friend is having birthday and we are [01:06:30] going for a dinner and it's happening in 45 minutes, so.
[01:06:33] Kalen: Nice, nice. Well thanks so much guys. This is, this is a blast. I'm sure Bartek has a date, a date or two to get to as well. Couple a couple of his girlfriends, but um,
[01:06:44] Bartek: with the girlfriends that Philip don't want to have
Okay, well
[01:06:52] Kalen: thanks. Thanks everybody for . Thanks everybody for tuning. And, uh, we will see you next week. Make [01:07:00] sure to check out Philip and Bartech on the socials. We'll, we'll plug, we'll plug their stuff in.
[01:07:06] Filip: Amazing. Thanks. Thanks for joining us.
[01:07:08] Willem: Thanks for listening. Bye-bye.
[01:07:10] Filip: Thanks. This is d be the brightest moment of my career.