[EN] S3E10 | Kevin @ Dendron: How to Index 10,000 Notes
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This goes back to the very beginning, like why I joined Amazon, why I did consulting, why I did Backup Table is because I wanted to build my own business and something that I was passionate about. It was everything else was a means to the end, but they weren't the end. And so the reason I stopped everything else was because those were all progressive stepping stones to now building Vengeance.

The risk of not doing something why I still felt like, you know, I could do it or like I needed to do it because, you know, it's only going to get harder. Worst case scenario, I burn through all my savings. You can always go back either the company that you were a part of or, you know, a new company. Like it's not the end of the world compared to the sort of things that other people go through. ♪ I'm gonna celebrate, oh yeah ♪ ♪ All right, don't stop the dancing ♪

Hello, everyone. Hello, listeners. Welcome to "From Zero to One." I'm Chi Bang Qiang. Hello, everyone. I'm Bill Zheng Tianyu. In "From Zero to One" season 3, we look for the true and influential leaders of the new industry, so that their stories and insights can be heard by more people. We upload videos to WeChat, WeChat, and Apple Podcasts.

In addition, the program has recently opened newsletter subscription email Welcome to subscribe and communicate with us via email If you think the content of the program is good Then I hope you can give us more likes and comments on the self-made platform This can also help us make better programs This episode's guest Kevin Lin is the founder and CEO of the knowledge management software Dandrian Dandrian is an open source, local storage as the priority personal knowledge management program

The project is based on the code editor VS Code, which helps developers to create a more efficient and expandable management and storage tool. In 2021, Dengjian selected YC Winter Entrepreneur and received a total investment of $2 million in April.

Kevin is a poker and sports enthusiast. He was born in China, grew up in Germany, and completed his studies in Canada and the United States. In 2013, after graduating from Leicester University, Kevin joined AWS, an Amazon network service. Five years later, Kevin left his job and founded a consulting firm, Xens, to provide technical consulting services for AWS operations.

In 2019, Kevin created a data-based SaaS project based on Airtable, DECAPTABLE. After a year of trial and error, Kevin decided to devote himself to creating a data-based information management software that allows users to fully control their own data, which is DANGEN. In this episode, Kevin shared his growth experience in multi-cultural areas, from AWS to choosing to think and analyze when starting a business, the process of experiencing at YC Startup Camp, and the current team based on multi-stages work mode and community culture.

Alright, we're gonna celebrate one more time

Hey, hello, Kevin. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Aaron. Hello, everyone. My Chinese name is Kevin. I will mostly speak English in this interview because I went abroad when I was four years old and my Chinese is not very familiar.

That's so cool. Thanks so much for your Chinese introduction. And we just mentioned your background to our audience. So I guess we can also start from here. We know you grew up in several locations. So how do you describe your own grow up stories? What's the actual feeling as a grow up in different country, different cultures? Yeah.

Thank you for that introduction. In terms of growing up, it seems like every few years we would move somewhere new. Really, it was some pattern of moving to a new place, learning a new language, and then forgetting the old language. That process happened a couple of times. So from China to Germany, and then Germany to Canada. As a kid, it was definitely tough. I would say I remember

There were times, for example, when moving, when I would negotiate a contract with my parents. So if we moved, then they had to raise my allowance because I really didn't want to move. So I got my allowance raised every time we moved. But in retrospect, I think it was good in the sense that I got to see the world. I know a lot of my friends who grew up in one place, you kind of have the perspective that life in Germany is how life everywhere is, or life in China is how everywhere is, or life in America.

And when you move around all the time, you just realize that life everywhere is different. So it definitely broadens your perspective. But at the same time, people everywhere are the same. People just do the thing. You mean that? Yeah. So what I mean by that is everywhere, like people want the same things. People want to be happy. People want...

you know, the kids to do well, people want their parents to be in good health, you know, despite cultures, languages, governments, and everything else. I find that people all around the world have the same aspirations, inspirations, and common things that make us happy or sad. Well,

I'm a little bit curious that how about your sense of belonging? Maybe you didn't ever proactively think about this until people ask you what's the actual situation. Yeah. So in terms of belonging, I would say that, you know, growing up, I didn't really feel like I belonged anywhere, you know, going like when I moved from China to Germany in Germany, I was an outsider same when I was in Canada. But then whenever I go back to China, I

because I've spent most of my life outside of China. People can tell I have an accent, and so don't really feel like I belong there either. I think this bothered me a lot more when I was little. With time, I think what I just realized is it's a trade-off.

Sure, I don't feel like I belong. I can't say that this is a place where I call home. But at the same point, I can also say the entire world is my home. I lived in so many different places, saw so many different faces. I feel pretty comfortable living everywhere. It definitely gives me a sort of freedom in the sense of where I want to work, what I want to do.

what I'm willing to do and you know all things being equal it is what it is I enjoyed it and I realized that it's given me a lot of perspective questions like this sense of belonging this concept I wonder is more people bring this concept to you or you are also naturally think about this when you're moving around

Yeah, I definitely used to think about this a lot more, especially because in the places that we settled down, I had a lot of friends and neighbors who lived in Nashville for their whole lives. They lived in the same house for their whole lives. Part of me was definitely envious because to know a place so well, to have a place that you can call home, and to live in a place for longer than a year, those were-- I mean, definitely there were things that I thought about.

when I was little. And I think growing up, I slowly made peace with. And this, going back to earlier too, while I realized I didn't have those firm roots at the same time, I was also exposed a lot more to different cultures and how different people lived. And I think it helps me a lot nowadays where Dengen is an international company. I work with people from all over the world. And it's definitely a lot easier for me to move and get along with people.

Is there any very impressive things that you still remember that you can share to us regarding all this? And I also wonder that during those transitions, are they all kind of passively that you have to move or that is probably just one transition maybe to the U.S.? Is it you actively to choose that you want to go? Yes, I think growing up, I never chose to go anywhere. This is all just, you know,

Little Kevin going places because his parents, you know, moved to places. I think the transition that probably stands out the most was my first one. So this was from China to Germany. So in China, it's pretty common for parents to drop off the child with the grandparent. And my parents, after they had me, they were getting their doctorates in Germany. What this meant is I spent the first four and a half years of my life living with my grandmother in Hunan.

And so, you know, up until that point, I had never really met my parents. They were only a voice on a phone call that we did, you know, once a month. And so when I was four, that's kind of when my parents decided to fly me to Germany. My grandmother came with me and that was the first time I left China. And that was, I would say, like the first time I really remember meeting my parents. That was a significant transition in the sense that it was my first one. I was being told that

I would live with these people who I really didn't have much familiarity with up until that point. How about the moment that you enter a totally different environment? How was the pressure? Because you basically have to adopt everything again, right? ZENG JIN: Yeah, I think when I first moved to Germany, I did not take it well. I just wanted to go back to China. I remember I wouldn't leave my grandmother. It got so bad that my grandmother, she was only supposed to stay, I believe, for a few weeks. She ended up staying for a year because I just wouldn't leave her.

And the only way that they actually got her to go back home was by telling me that, hey, like you have to stay home. Grandmother is going to go shopping, which they didn't mention this, that she was going to go shopping in China because she took a plane and flew back to China. And I was very upset. This must be very tough time, lots of feelings there. Then when time comes to the 20, now you come to Rice University. How was the time in Rice University?

Yeah, Guy's University, it was great. I think I look back fondly at times in college. I remember when I was applying to schools, even though I was living in the United States, I was still an international student because I was Canadian. I didn't have US citizenship, so I had to apply as an international student. Limited choices just because not very many places gave financial aid to international students. America is just ridiculously expensive.

Gice was nice in the sense that they covered the cost of my tuition. It was a good school. Yeah, it was-- Gice has-- so for people who are familiar with Harry Potter, Gice has a similar system where in Harry Potter you had four houses, like Gryffindor and Slytherin and Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw. At Gice, we had the same thing called the residential college system, but we had 11 houses instead of four.

And so you were randomly assigned a house. And then that house becomes your family for the next four years. Definitely met a lot of friends there who I still keep in touch with today. I have really good memories from Waze. FRANCESC CAMPOY: What do you like at that moment? Do you have any hobby? ZHUO LI: Yeah, I mean, in terms of hobbies, I think what I ended up developing-- the things I ended up picking up were learning and reading.

I love to read books. In Canada, I think I had the distinction of they had a program called the Accelerated Reader Program, where after you read a book, you could take a quiz and get points depending on how many answers you got right. It was to promote kids to read. And I think I had the most points in Ontario in middle school because I got a lot. And then, yeah, also long distance running, I joined the track.

track and field, cross-country. I gravitated towards those things because I could do them by myself. I wasn't very social with other people. And so running and reading were great because it didn't require me to talk to anyone to do them.

I see. I see. And then you, I mean, back to the university that when you go here and you started to choose the computer science and before that, uh, are you already sounding it? And you know, there's some like the programming before that. I like programming, but going to ice, I wasn't actually sure if that was going to be my field of choice.

So nowadays, programming is hot. Everybody wants to get into CS. But when I went to school, even back in 2008, 2009, people still remember dot com and the bust. My parents were actually questioning, did I really want to go into this field? Or did I want to be a lawyer or a doctor instead? Because we don't know what software is going to make.

And when I went to college, I think I was deciding between electrical engineering or computer engineering. I ultimately chose software just because it's so much faster to make things in software. You can have an idea and have a product by the end of a weekend.

I loved making stuff, publishing it, seeing how people reacted, and that fast feedback cycle. And it helped that Geist University, you didn't have to choose a major. A lot of schools, you have to declare a major before you go in. But Geist was pretty flexible. I think it was until the second year, at the end of the second year, that you actually had to declare for a department.

Yeah, as you mentioned, you like creating new stuff and I see that when you're in the college, you are doing a project called Talon. So what is Talon?

Yeah, so Talon was a project, I believe, my junior year. The reason I made Talon was the reason why I'm doing a business is because I think the most enjoyable part of my life is when I get to work with people I respect on projects that I care about. And so Talon was a social network that I created.

advice to facilitate that. And so this idea is that people had projects they wanted to do but needed people with certain skills to do those projects. Talon was a two-sided marketplace where people-- one side could list the projects and the skills that they needed, and then the other side were people who had those skills. And so people could come together and work on projects.

How did you allocate the time? I mean, at that moment, the lectures, the start-up things. From nowadays, I know that lots of times you told me that you always want to open your own business instead of just joining a company for working for many, many years. Is that, I mean, at that time, you already had such a

kind of assault yeah i mean at that time um it was definitely some an idea that i've always had even back then is i wanted to start my own business it was less about the business but more it actually goes into like what talent was about like our motto is find cool people to do awesome projects with and for me like i realized you know maybe this ties into like moving around a lot the things that ultimately brought me satisfaction was doing exactly that like working with

good people and working on projects that we cared about. And so for me, working on talent and working on a business was just in a sense, this is how I am able to make sure that these two things are true for me, that I am working with awesome people and that I am working on projects that I care about.

Working at a different company, working for someone else, it could happen, but it's always something that you're at the mercy of things working out. Your manager assigning you to the right project, your company assigning you to the right place. You know, part of me was very much in the

like, hey, I want to control this. Like I want to be, I don't want to be the kid that moves around without any control of my destiny. This is something that I want to be able to have a say in. And so in my mind, that meant starting a business.

When you graduated from Rice, how many choices did you have? We know that you chose to join Amazon. Also, I want to quote the saying from you that I always have the plan to start my own company and I never expected to stay five years. But between those projects and the people, I always found the reason to stay.

What's the reason that you joined and want to stay at Veriface? ZHUO LI: Yeah, you're referring to when I joined Amazon. One, it was a company that I wanted to join. But two, I had a time limit for myself that I didn't want to be there for too long. The reason I wanted to join Amazon was because early on, I was one of the early adopters at AWS.

Back then, it was just EC2, the compute service, and S3, the storage service. But to me, even back then, it was obvious to me cloud was the future. And I, at that time, also did some side gigs helping startups use AWS back in the early days.

I did an internship also at Amazon in college. And the thing that I was impressed by and that I grew to appreciate is in terms of institutional knowledge of building things at scale, there was probably no place better in the world than Amazon, specifically AWS.

And so to me, after college, this idea that I knew I wanted to do something in industry, I didn't want to go to graduate school, but I knew that going to Amazon, if I could go to AWS, take lessons there from how to build software at scale and be not just like passively be okay, but like thrive in that sort of operational environment, that

then that would be a great indicator that I can do something on my own later on. Because in terms of like an engineering education, I felt like that would be the best, like that would be better than anything else I could be doing at that time. When you were at Amazon, you also did your own podcast. Is that your first podcast that you're hosting? Yes. And so the reason I did my podcast, and that was the first podcast I hosted, was when I was in college,

I did journalism. So I was part of the Rice Fresher that was a school newspaper. And so I did stories for the Fresher. And what I liked about that is I learned that as long as I had a good reason, I could talk to basically anyone I wanted. So for example, at Rice, like Alberto Gonzalez, attorney general at the time, came over to give a talk to Rice students. I

I actually just emailed his aide at the time and told him we wanted to interview him for the Thresher, and if he would sit down and talk with me. And they were like, OK. And then I told the Thresher, hey, Alberto Gonzalez wants to talk to me.

I'm going to do this interview. What I learned from that experience and from experiences like that is as long as I had a good reason, I could show people that I wasn't wasting their time. I could talk to basically anyone that I wanted to. When I was at Amazon, going back into this theme of I was there for Amazon to learn. Amazon was, I was surrounded by all these smart people, principal engineers, VPs, managers. Thing is though, because Amazon has all these projects and I was working on one of them,

I realized I wouldn't have a chance to talk to these people besides for like if we were in a someone got paged and I was talking to them about why our service was down or why their service was down. And so for me, I wanted to find a way, create this excuse of just talking to people I was interested in. The funny thing is it didn't even start off with a podcast.

So there was a principal engineer that was working on my team. His name is Colm McCarthy. If you're familiar in AWS, you would know about Colm because he was one of the principal architects behind Gout53, the DNS service, CloudFront, Amazon's global CDN, and also Elastic Load Balancing. So anyways, he instrumented a lot of the significant network primitives at AWS. I wanted to have an hour conversation with Colm. And so I said, Colm, like, hey,

I just want to like talk to you for an hour and like write it down. And then I think he like misunderstood what he thought, like, oh, so you want to do a podcast? So I just went along with it and said, yes, I want to do a podcast. I remember my first conversation with Colm. I had never done anything with podcasting at the time. I used my phone to record. The audio was horrible. Everything was horrible. Everybody loved it anyways, because it was talking with Colm for an hour and

And KOM is awesome. And so that's kind of how it started. And after I had KOM on, it was really a lot easier to talk to other engineers, and then from engineers to VPs and other people. ZIUAN LIU: Yeah. And I just want to echo that 100% agree that you're

what's your thoughts about the benefits that when you do a podcast that you can have something, you know, the reason to say, you know, more decent reason to say, OK, I want to interact with you that actually that you are buying their probably 10 years or 15 years experience. Right. So which is very precious. I would say sometimes when you talk to those people, it's not just, I mean, knowing them, but just a

also help yourself to recognize yourself more clearly. Talking to those very brilliant people, then you know that, okay, then you probably more clearly to know that what I can do. So I believe this probably also, I mean, shape you in many, many ways, many, many dimensions. Then what triggers you to live at that time? Yeah.

Yeah. In terms of leaving, like my plan was always to stay at Amazon for around two years and then leave. After my two year point, there was a point where I needed to decide, okay, like I've been here for two years. What should I do now? My idea at that point was I could either leave and start my own company or I

Amazon, being such a big company, there's new teams all the time doing new things. And so there are teams where you can join where basically it's like a startup, where you're the first engineer. You're coming up with the product. You're coming up with the vision.

And so I was in talks with one of those teams who wanted to hire me or not even that. But the choice was essentially, do I want to spend my own money and time like trying to do a startup? Or do I want to try to do a startup inside Amazon while still earning a salary? And things kind of fell in place where I could do that inside Amazon. And so for the next few years at Amazon, I think I was...

either the first developer or the lead of about three to four different new initiatives at Amazon. Through each of them, I gradually expanded a bigger role and a bigger responsibility. But that was the reason why I ended up staying on for another three years, is because I was able to essentially do this dry run of trying to build a startup while still having a salary and not being on the street.

Well, I think my current stage is very similar like yours and I am at my fifth year in current company. Did you feel any people pressure at that moment? What is triggering pushing you to this change and leaving a big party? It also means that you're going to handle hundreds of things and many, many travails by your own. So it also means that you're going to drop out your stable payment after going out. Have you ever doubt your choice or say actually that you found out I should come earlier?

For me, I think the way that what helped me make the choice was I set time limits for myself. And at those limits, I would evaluate. First one we talked about, it's like at the two-year mark, I had to decide, you know, did I want to join or did I want to leave? And then for every subsequent year I was at Amazon, it was always at the end of the year, I would ask myself, why am I still staying? Like the bias was always to leave unless there was a good reason for me to stay.

At year five, I ended up leaving just because Amazon has different colored badges to indicate how long you've been with the company. After your first five years, you get a yellow badge. And then after your 10 years, you got a red badge and so on and so forth.

And the usual stat is like, if you stay at Amazon for five years and get a yellow badge, there's like a ridiculous, like 70, 80% chance you'll stay there for like another five to 10 years. For me at the five year point, I already figured that I've learned as much as I was going to

And there was always more to learn, but it's diminishing returns. And also, if I stay another year, there's a very good chance that I might just never leave. With that, I decided that the five-year mark was going to be when I left.

And the way that I kind of talk myself out of doubts, because of course I had doubts. It's like you never having going from like a steady income to being on your own and not really knowing what the future holds. It's always scary. And what I basically ended up talking over myself is I'm young. I don't have any debts. I have a lot of savings. Like worst case scenario, I burn through all my savings. I can come back and work at Amazon.

or at another tech company. It's not the end of the world. Compared to the sort of things that other people go through, I had a lot of options. And even though it felt this very scary thing in my mind, putting things in perspective, it really wasn't. And this isn't just like-- I would say for anyone that's working in software engineering right now, you basically don't have that much of a risk. You make-- in terms of there's so much demand, the worst case is your thing doesn't take off.

is you can always go back either the company that you were a part of or a new company. Everyone's hiring. Tendron is hiring. At the end of the day, the risk of not doing something why I still felt like I could do it or I needed to do it because it's only going to get harder.

I know some people are in the opinion, the best time to do a startup is when you're in your 40s. And most startups are actually there. To me, it always seems, at that point, a family, a house, a mortgage, all these other things versus me in my 20s without any dependencies or dependents, I couldn't really see a better time in my life to do something that was Gursky. That's really, really cool.

Later on, we know that it was 2018 and you left and set up a consultant business, which is also talking to AWS. So this idea is shaped, I mean, is raised before you leave or just after you leave? And how did you get your first client?

It's funny because I was just talking about, you know, like it's really not that risky to leave your job. But the first thing I did after I left my job was trying to figure out how am I going to make money in case my startup doesn't work. You mean that you left and then you start to think about...

was I going to do next? ZEN LIN: Yeah, so I had an idea. But essentially, I thought of this in stages. Despite what it might seem, I'm pretty risk averse. What I wanted to do is I wanted to prove out my ability to support myself without an employer. And so the first step, I figured, was--

I had an idea for a startup I wanted to do, but I don't know if this startup can make money. So first, I want to see, can I get jobs in something where I know I can make money and see if I can just establish my independence first? And so that's why I did AWS consulting, because I knew that there was a lot of demand for it. I had the expertise for it. If I was able to prove to myself that, hey, even if my startup doesn't work out or it burns a lot of cash,

that I can support myself financially anyways, it was going to get me closer to doing my own startup. And so this is why when I left Amazon, my first focus for the initial half a year was, can I make it on my own as a consultant before I do a startup?

And the way that I got my first client was I just went to every single AWS meetup in Seattle. There's a lot of AWS meetups. I talked to everyone. I asked people essentially what problems they were having. You know, I would offer solutions and then they would end up hiring me because it turned out my solutions were pretty good. Anyways, it was just a lot of these networking events and talking to strangers and just listening to people.

I also want to highlight one point. Last time you told me that there's a very brilliant thing. So this is kind of like Amazon harrying your bike, right? You left and in another way that Amazon is still some way that harries your bike and giving you probably more higher salary.

So that was funny. And it was like halfway into my consulting career, if you will. And at that point, things were going pretty well. I had like three to five clients at any one time. Something I started to do is like write more technical blog posts about things that were particular to AWS, technical challenges and whatnot.

A lot of it is kind of for me mostly. I like writing about this stuff. It helps me remember them and just think over how to do it next time. But one of my blog posts I had written was picked up by the head of AWS marketing

one of the heads there. They really liked it and they had a problem with essentially training people on AWS and getting people to just get through the basics. They reached out to me, you know, we talked about it. One thing led to another and I ended up doing a contracting gig with AWS on onboarding. That's how I got AWS as a client.

Yeah, this really encouraged me as a young man. If you still can settle the loss and if you can foresee, you know, up limit is bigger, the wind side is bigger, why don't we take a bet? As a young man, we should be able to bear more risk. Yeah,

And actually also in the same year, 2018, you also did an interview with GeekWire. And I see in that post there was a photo about your desk at home. Very interesting. At that time, you were doing a consultant stuff called the lamps. Regarding the image, I zoom in, zoom in, and I see next to the desk is this whiteboard. You are writing some wording like...

monsleygoal-talkto50.ops. Why are you writing this? Is this related to the business or something like the personal goals? Yeah, well, first of all, I want to congratulate you on the first person that asked me about the whiteboard. You know, I did research on my guests beforehand, but I think you do much better research than I did. In terms of the whiteboard, yeah, I had goals for myself every month. I think something that I realized very quickly is that

As an engineer, I think we typically don't. Most engineers I talk to, most of my friends who try to do startups, that's always the thing that they struggle with. It was also the same for me. But I think one thing that Amazon does a really good job at instilling you with its leadership principles. And so first and foremost is customer obsession. Like talk to your customers, know your customers, figure out their pain points.

And so for me, for consulting, I started off without any sort of clientele and any sort of experience doing this on my own. I wanted to make sure I am not just sitting and twiddling my thumbs waiting for people to come to me. I wanted to cast my net far and wide.

This is why I talked to a bunch of startups, went to all the startup events, went to all the AWS events, showed blog posts. The GeekWire post, that wasn't like GeekWire decided to interview me. I submitted myself for a nomination. And so essentially, everywhere where I could find-- I think of it as like planting seeds.

like just getting my name out in as many places as I could. And then eventually some of that is going to bear fruit. I really voted. I mean, for this idea, I also, I mean, a hundred percent agree that, uh, you know, actually you build the things. Yeah, that's works. And, uh, but the really hard things that how you just get your clients, I mean, how get people to use something. So marketing is also part of the job. So when people start using your products, using your

I mean, ideas. This is a real start. It's not just you're finishing your work and you throw it away and that's the end. Also, I mean, this actually, that post also mentioned you that you need best cities to manage your work and life. Did you consider yourself having probably this kind of software note taking lover and probably also later on leads you to today, Danjun. Are you still using the best cities?

Like stickies and stuff. Actually, one of the best things about working at Amazon, which I really miss, is an unlimited supply of sticky notes. Amazon isn't known for giving very many perks, but they did have office supplies. And so I went through a lot of sticky notes when I was at Amazon.

But that's an aside. In terms of note-taking, yes, I was always into note-taking, though I wouldn't... The way I thought in my mind wasn't note-taking per se, but knowledge management. There's so much to know. Information is overwhelming. We're all surrounded by it. We're all drowning in it. Anything you want to do, whether that be technology or baking turkey recipes, there's a million different ways to do it. For me, I don't have...

a great memory. The only way that I could figure out-- the only way that seems like it would make sense for me to make sense of the world is to somehow externalize information that I cared about and being able to find it again. That is something that more or less

has been something that I've been thinking about since college. And so now it's over a decade. I've kept a journal since middle school. I've kept meticulous notes in electronic formats just because that's the only way that I could carry them with me because we moved around so much. And so it's always been for me about how do you

with all this information, it becomes hard to make use of anything if it's just all there. And so knowledge management has always been something that I've been passionate about. When I left Amazon, it was the startup that I wanted to build, a startup around knowledge management, around note-taking. And the only reason it took me another two years to build it was because being scared of not knowing how to monetize it, not knowing how to build a business off of it,

Uh, but just knowing that this was something that I needed for myself. Yeah. Now, since I was a dose getting connected and, uh, that's why I later on you come up with a knowledge management tool idea, but before you really kick off a dungeon, this project and, uh, just right out of this project. So in the between, I see you do have another project cause, uh,

Backup Table, which is a SaaS service that can backup all your data in the Airtable. Airtable is a product that can store all kinds of information in the Excel's way. So what's the story here?

Yeah, so in terms of Backup Table, that's like another demonstration of my risk averseness in the sense that it was the year I added Amazon and I've proven to myself that I can support myself independently through consulting. And so now I was ready to build my startup, but before I built Tendron, I wanted to see

I don't know how to monetize the engine. Can I build some sort of software that I know I can monetize and just do a dry run and make sure that I'm able to do all the steps? And so at the time, I was an early adopter of Airtable. I used Airtable to track every conversation I've ever had with any person and built this like good CRM into it. For me, one thing I'm always paranoid about is owning my own data. Airtable was completely...

online. And so I didn't want to invest in anything where I couldn't have ownership of my files or my notes, if you will. And so Airtable didn't have a backup solution. I created one. And then I noticed in the forums that a lot of people wanted this as well. And so I figured before I work on Dendron, let's make a little SaaS that backs

up Airtable. And it's going back to the AWS strategy. I knew that there was a demand for this. I had built something, and it was going to be a quick way of just going through all the steps of monetizing software. That's why I built up Backup Table. The cool thing is Backup Table took a couple of weeks to

mostly just integrating payments and getting online. But as soon as it was online from the first day, I had paying customers who wanted to and did use Backup Table to back up their Airtable. How do you socialize this and how is the people's feedback on it?

I did post it. So this goes back to marketing. Unfortunately, if you build it today, they will not come. And this kind of goes hand in hand with we're all drowning in information. Nobody knows because there's always a million things going on. And so when I had Backup Table,

I think I posted it on Hacker News. I posted in the Airtable forum. I got banned from the Airtable forum, apparently, because I'm not quite sure why, because it wasn't against the terms of service. But anyways, I posted it in a lot of places. So it wasn't just waiting for people to come, but actively pushing it out.

Then why later on this project got a halt is because you found out the game table for this is too small because it's only for Airtable. So this goes back to the very beginning, like why I joined Amazon, why I did consulting, why I did backup table is because I wanted to build my own business and something that I was passionate about. It was everything else was a means to the end, but they weren't the end. And so the reason I stopped everything else was because those were all progressive stepping stones to now

building Dendron. MARK MIRCHANDANI: By when you write down the first code to about this Dendron? Yeah, I have plenty of questions about Dendron. But how about maybe the first question is, what is Dendron? ZHANG LI: Yeah, so the high level summary is that Dendron is a note-taking tool that helps humans organize, reference, and work with information at scale.

What this means-- easier to see if you compare it to existing note-taking tools and knowledge bases. All tools today, they try to make it easy to get your notes in. But past a certain threshold, usually at 1,000 notes or 10,000 notes, it becomes very hard to get anything back out again.

Search can't do it. Tags can't do it. Organization falls apart. And it just becomes a mess. That's the goal that Dengen is trying to solve is when you have lots of information, when you have over 10,000 notes, how can you still organize, reference, and make use of that information? And then the way that we do that--

The implementation of that is essentially by looking at how developers manage code, realizing that actually code is just information. And if you look at large code bases, like the Android code base, it's over 15 million lines of code.

But we're still able to grapple with that complexity and not just, you know, scale everything into Google and search for it. And the reason why developers can manage large code bases is because code has a basic structure, there are basic semantics to code. And then we spent the last 50 years building developer tooling to work with those semantics.

So you can refactor, so you can look up, so you can extract and associate. And so the way, the trick, the fundamental idea behind Dendron is that we can manage general knowledge at scale by making general knowledge, the management of it, more like managing code. Those are the ideas that Dendron has built around. Dendron, we use a superset of Markdown. So we add our own syntax and structure to the language.

To make it a little bit more structural, we introduced what we call schemas, which is you can think of it as a type system, but it describes how your nodes are structured. Based on that structure, we also introduced concepts and tooling like refactoring, lookup, and everything else that programmers are generally accustomed to doing with code, but now being able to do that with your nodes.

And what that means is that you can, even when you have thousands and thousands of notes, ensure that you have a consistent structure, a consistent organization over all your information. How was the situation back to very early days? And from the YouTuber, I found out you actually published a video that you and another friend were applying for YCCAMP.

Yeah, so the early days, what happened is the initial version of Tendron, it was called Alpha Cortex. At that point, it was focused on how do we help other people organize their information? It was more of an organization like Index than a note-taking tool. The reason for that is because I wanted to show-- because most people don't have 10,000 notes. For most people, it's kind of hard to figure out why having a consistent structure would be beneficial.

And so I wanted to organize a complex domain and show people the value of that. And so Alpha Cortex organized AWS docs because AWS is very complicated, showed it all in one place and had a nice structured way of navigating it. So in terms of what happened initially is that with Alpha Cortex, I applied to UIC and

YC very much encourages you to not apply as a solo founder, just because statistically, solo founders don't make it. And so this is why at that time I enlisted my friend Luke to apply with me. And the idea is if we got in, then he would join the project. But if not, in that sense, it was basically always me writing the code and doing the implementation. But the video that you're referring to, the co-founder business project,

That was because I wanted to heighten my chances of getting a 2IC.

So how about the other applicants? And when you apply in this, do you already have the minimal roundabout version available? Yeah. So YC takes people at all levels. You can apply with nothing but an idea on a napkin, or you can apply at a series A stage. During my batch, I've seen people in both extremes. For Dendron, where we were at is Dendron was something that it was an implemented idea. I had a prototype. I didn't

I had some people at AWS using it, but it was by no means like a commercial product. The reason I had Luke come along and do the application with me is just because one of the guiding tenants for YC for admissions is that they really do encourage you to not apply it or to apply with a co-founder.

Nowadays we know there's a very hot knowledge management tool called Notion. They just reached a 10 billion valuation in October. And Microsoft also launched a new product called Loop, which is very similar with Notion at the very first glance. And in the meanwhile, existing big players, like Confidence Spies and Atlas, still hold the big companies' favor. So the market for this, no doubt, is very hot.

but i also feel it's quite competitive and actually besides those three i also found out that there's actually a quite a bunch of full open source or say half open source solutions for example wrong research from obstian log seek dendron here and with some of them are

looks also very similar in the GUI or the workflow. So what's the difference between Dendron and them in your view? And what's your philosophy when you're building this application? Yeah, so to go into the details. First, Roam is an open source, but Foam is. Foam is also built inside of VS Code. There's some superficial... In terms of what makes Dendron different, I can either answer this in what makes Dendron different from Notion, Roam, or a specific tool, or what makes Dendron different

different in general. If we look at, for example, like Notion or Rome, like the immediate thing that stands out or Obsidian, those are the three big, sort of the big like note-taking tools. It said Dendron is open source. Dendron is local. So that means that all the files are on your computer. They're not on someone else's server. Dendron works on plain text markdown. Last one's pretty

significant for developers because it means that you can version control, you can use Git, you can use all the tools that you're used to. Furthermore, Dendron in particular, we integrate with your IDE. So Dendron is actually a plugin inside of VS Code. What this means is you can work with your code and you can have your knowledge base and it's all in one place. Everything is keyboard driven. Everything is meant to be one to two keystrokes away.

And we're developer-focused in that sense of having a very keyboard-driven architecture, very extendable. Everything is hackable or extensible in some way. Those are some of the-- if you list out a feature set or the orientation,

Dendron is focused at developers. We integrate into your IDE. We're local. We make everything as easy as possible for a developer to use. But on the bigger point of what makes Dendron different than just about any other note-taking tool, especially nowadays, note-taking tools are like mushrooms. There's a new note-taking tool every other day. It's a very crowded space. The reason I would argue that it is a crowded space is because fundamentally, nobody has figured out how

humans can access and reference information at scale. And by scale, I mean in the scale of an individual knowledge base or an organizational knowledge base. Because the pushback I always get when I say that is like, what about Google? Google indexes the whole world's information. In some sense, that's an easier problem because you have the whole world's information. Every site in the world is trying to structure the data so that Google's search bot can index it and call it.

But when you're dealing with the size of organization or individual, you don't have enough data. It's incomplete and it's not structured. So the short answer there is like, you know, if search were the answer to like organizing human information for individuals,

individuals and organizations, then Google Docs should be amazing. But Google Docs is where documents go to that. And so there's this gap right now for humans managing information at their own scale. This is the gap that every note-taking tool, including Dengen, is trying to fill.

The problem that I see with current note-taking tools is they all focus on the first part of the problem of, how do I make it easier to get notes into the system? Notion is very beautiful. You can bring your stuff in. In Rome, they pioneered bidirectional linking so that this idea that you can embed content in one place and have it show up everywhere and then also not really think about your structure because you can just do links. This all helps in terms of getting information in, but it all helps up to the point that it doesn't.

Where it stops helping, it's different for everyone. It could be at 100 notes. It could be at 1,000 notes. It could be at 10,000 notes. But none of these tools really work well past that point. Dendron, we also help you get your notes in. We make it easy for you to enter. We make it easier for you to link. But we are the only ones, I would say, that focus very much

on after 10,000 notes, how is your knowledge base still usable? How can you still organize reference and make use of that information? The way that we do that, this goes back again to making note-taking more like programming is by adding structure and helping you work with that structure. If you look at the marketing sides of a lot of note-taking, like it's almost like weight loss where organizing your own notes, it's kind of like a bad word. Like when people first try to use Tendron, they immediately put off or they immediately notice like, why?

do you focus on structure? Why do you focus on hierarchy? Because a lot of tools nowadays, they emphasize on, put everything in a graph. Link stuff in your journals, and then you can find things through backlinks and whatnot. And the problem with this is it's kind of like weight loss. Everybody wants to sell you a weight loss pill and tell you, hey, with this weight loss pill, you can lose weight and not do any work.

But the problem is that generally doesn't work because to lose weight, it's not hard. But you have to eat the right things and exercise and do that consistently. The same thing with note taking. How do you organize it? How do you keep it usable? You have to organize your notes.

An organization isn't sexy, but that is the thing. We don't shy away from that. To make tension work for you, you have to put in some work in the structure. But we give you the tools to maintain that structure. Actually, there's been a really great case study lately just because we've been

Adding so many new users and adding so many features, we had to reorganize our Dendron Wiki, which has all the Dendron features and everything in it. We recently refactored our Wiki. It took the course of a couple of hours and a single afternoon, but it resulted in over 300 pages being updated and over 2,000 lines being updated within the Wiki. After that change, not a single link broke, not a single page went offline.

Everything was so available. And we fundamentally re-architected how the entire site was laid out. That was a really great moment just because it's not something you can do in any other tool. You want to reorganize your notes in Rome, go in every single note and edit it. This just goes back to what makes Denture indifferent? We help you organize. We help you organize at scale.

Yeah, I want to echo this part with a small story of mine. It's about the Notion. So when I first saw it, I was so excited. I thought this is something I want, it's pretty cool. But later on, I didn't really use it.

The reason I found out is that I realized it didn't actually really change the point that you have to be an Organizable person first then you can work out an Organizable information repository to be a master of this kind of tool so I believe Dendron is trying to solve this or is this kind of a problem for users by applying

more natural recording and association approach and the first step is developer community itself because as a developer we do write down a lot of documentation so we have to associate different technology points right so yeah so back to the YC story so how was the question you that want you in the process and how was the process

So, I mean, the YC interview process, you know, I can only speak for my own experience of it. It is definitely a very specific format. There is a written application. If they like your written application, they invite you in for an interview. Nowadays, it's all over Zoom. But the YC interview, it's unstructured. But the thing to know is that it is

and I forget now, but it's either five minutes or 10 minutes long in total. So you don't have a lot of time. And so the main thing for that particular format is that you just need to make sure that you get your points in because depending on who you get in your interview loop, it's the different YC partners. And sometimes it's easy for them to like go into a side channel or pick into like a specific feature. And within like that short amount of time, like having that one side conversation and then you've lost all your time.

The main thing for the YC interview is just to like, I think YC has gone back and forth on the guidance of should you practice for it or should you not? Because the idea is it's not supposed to be like a formal thing. It's supposed to be a conversation. But honestly, with that time, you kind of have to practice for that format just to know that like what that time feels like so you can get your points up.

And then the way that it worked for me is I did two rounds of interviews. So sometimes if the first interview is not enough or like the partners haven't agreed, then they give you a second round of interviews with different partners. You know, I remember it being questioned for, cause when I applied to YC this time, I applied as a solo founder. And so that's questions I got about like, why applies to solo founder or like,

Have you thought about adding a co-founder? And then also questions about the field that you're in. So for me, it was about note taking and not just about Dendron, but what do I think about note taking as a whole? What are the wider trends? Why do you think it's where it is right now? It really depends on the projects. Every interview is a little different. But as long as you have a good idea of your product, your industry, your reasons for doing what you're doing, those kind of cover your basis.

When you pass this one, how long do you get a congratulation email, something like that, the SMS? So, I mean, after the interview, they get back to you pretty quickly. Usually, we turn the week. And then for my case, it was that they wanted to do a follow-up interview.

And then the follow-up interview was scheduled for next week. But then after the follow-up interview, I think I got a call from one of the partners the same night. It's funny because the first time we called, I let it go to voicemail because I didn't recognize the number. And then I listened to the voicemail. I was like, oh, hey, it's Rory. I just wanted to talk to you about YC, if you can call me back. And so I called him back.

Wow, it's an exciting moment, right? And then you did another round in the next week? So at that point, no. The phone call was for the acceptance. So at that time, that was after the second interview.

And then this means that you're already in and that you have to prepare something like that three months and to prepare the demo day. Am I right? Yeah. So, I mean, after you're in there, between the time that you're in and when YC starts, they have a rolling admissions process. So I think I ended up coming in in November, but the YC winter 21 batch

which I was part of, did not start until January. So there was like a month and a half between when I got in and the batch actually started. Yeah, this reminds me that I read some books before. It's about YC saying that YC has a very powerful network. So how do you feel like this? How

how YC is helping you have in danger in this case? JOHN MUELLER: Many cases, there are many forms. I think the biggest part of YC is the YC network. Having access to the partners, we can book office hours with them if we want to talk about a specific part about the business.

YC-- so this is where YC is similar to Amazon in the sense that in the very beginning, I told you I joined Amazon because Amazon has more institutional experience with working with software at scale than just about any other place in the world. YC probably has more institutional experience

with startups than any place in the world. And being at YC, there's an internal knowledge base for just about any situation you can run into. So from fundraising to hiring to firing to different business models to different exits, it's either internal in a knowledge base or internal inside an office hour with a partner. So there's just that institutional knowledge that comes with being part of YC.

The second part is just the YC network. Every person that has ever gone through YC is part of the YC network. And by being in YC, it's much easier to talk to anyone else that has ever been in YC. And so, you know, before I even went to YC, I started reaching out to some of the former founders that went through the space, especially people that are in note-taking or like VS Code related startups to talk to them about Dendro and some of the issues we were going through. YC has this really great platform.

mentality of paying it forward. So like for alums who have gone through the program to help people that are going through the program. So it was really easy to reach out and talk to people that have ever gone through a YC badge. And then also fundraising. At the very end, you've talked about this already, the YC badge culminates in Demo Day, which is a two-day event now.

where every YC company gives a one minute pitch about what their company is about. And during that event, basically anyone that invests in tech will attend, will hear you out. And then afterwards, investors have this interface where they can like your pitch or not. And when they like your pitch, it means that they're interested in investing.

At that point, it's up to you to follow up and make a connection. But what's amazing about Demo Day and raising from YC or going through YC is usually when you raise money, the power dynamics are very much not in your favor because you're a startup. You might be running out of money and a VC doesn't have any timeline to get back to you. Like they never want to like they're never incentivized to say no to you because you could be the next Facebook, but they don't have to say yes to you like today, tomorrow or ever.

But the nice thing with Demo Day is it's this forcing function because every VC is competing with every other VC to invest in a YC company. And they know that if they don't do it within that first week, they might not get the chance. And so what that means for you as a startup is one, it's an incredible point of focus where you make a pitch to basically anyone that might invest in your company. You get to do it once and have everyone be there.

But the second thing is that they are all competing with each other to invest in you, which means that that whole process of raising money, something that can take months or years, is usually compressed into a much shorter time frame. Yeah, wow. This is just like a black forest, right? Spread the panic and force people to speed up to get the decision. So currently, I see Dengen has four investors. How were you connecting them? And are they also through YC?

So all our investors, most of them came through YC. Some of them I knew from Seattle. Two of our venture-backed VCs are actually Seattle VCs. And I have one of the VCs I met earlier just from different Seattle tech events. But I will say that being in YC, it definitely caused them to reach out to me versus the other way around. So I

um in terms of like raising money like definitely i would say like all our investors one way or another found dungeons through yc yeah let me throw out maybe a hard question previously we mentioned at a very early stage you do have a friend luke and the youtuber saying that if the application to yc can get powers then youtube can get together but this didn't happen in the end so uh i guess this is probably not only one difficulty things and upset things so could you show us a bit more uh

What exactly happened in your early stage? So what was the difficulties? Yeah, so here's the timeline, because this goes over multiple years. The first year when I applied to YC, it was with Alpha Cortex. And I had Luke join me in the video as my co-founder, because I wanted to increase my chances of going into YC. At that point, Luke wasn't really working on anything, Alpha Cortex. But it was more with the agreement that if we got in, then he would work with me on it.

Luke was never really a co-founder, but he would have been a co-founder if we got in. Because we didn't get in at that point. And he did his own projects, I did mine. That was not a formal arrangement. And then later on, what happened is I did apply to UIC as a solo founder. I got in.

And then at the end of YC, after raising money, I convinced one of my friends, so Kiran, to join me as my first hire. For him, it was always, we talked about it in the beginning, he was one of the early users of Gentron. He really loved it. But at the same time, he was getting ready to retire. He was going to have his first kid go to India and just like,

According to his words, be of no productive use to anyone whatsoever. I made an offer of like, hey, why don't you join me with Dendron? Let's work together for six, seven months. And then when you have your kid, you can decide on if you still want to retire or if you want to continue. And so Kiran worked with me for the seven months up to having the kid. And then at that point, I decided the short of life was a little too stressful and he had too many things going on. And so he's taking time with the kid.

Yeah, this is very natural. But what's the impact and how do you deal with it? Yeah, so when Quran first joined, it was me and him. So it was two people. But by the time Quran, like I talked to Quran, we decided like, you know, it would be better for him to just take time with his family at this point. Dhenzhen was already at six people. And so six, seven people. So it was already very different. And like at that point, we already had friends.

the necessary personnel and systems built in place where that transition was much like went very smoothly. Yeah, talking about this now, I see Dendron is a team with eight. So I can see teammates are all around the world, India, China, Philippines, South Korea, and of course, US. And this is a real global team, I feel, because you have the

lots of time runs. This is also like the digital nomad because you don't really face to face in person. So I'm wondering how you come up with this kind of structure. Don't you feel like the face to face is more efficient? Yeah. So from the very beginning, Tencent was going to be remote first, but not just remote, but async.

And what I mean, like a lot of companies now are remote because they have to be because of COVID. But when companies say remote, what they really mean is you can work in India, but you have to work at an East Coast time zone. That's what they mean by remote. At Dendron, it's you work remotely, you also work on your own time. We have one meeting every week that the whole team needs to attend. It's one hour long. That's our weekly planning session.

But everything else happens asynchronously through our Discord, through Dendron, and through various Google Docs and other things that we do. And part of this, I will say, has turned out to be really great for us in the sense that

Our whole value as a company is this idea that we can externalize knowledge so that two people or 10 people don't have to be in the same room. And this is because in a lot of companies, that's a bottleneck. Even at Amazon or big tech companies, you mentioned how Amazon was on Confluence. Amazon wasn't actually on Confluence. Amazon was using all the knowledge management tools. Amazon had its own wiki that was a fork-off media wiki or...

Amazon, some teams use Confluence. Nowadays they're using Quip, but everybody was using something different. But at the end of the day, if you wanted to know what was going on, you talk to the principal engineer, you talk to the people that have been here the longest because institutional knowledge did not exist in that sense of like trying to find it in a knowledge base. And so for Dendron, because we're people, we work from negative eight UTC to positive nine UTC. It is impossible for us to be in the same room most of the time, or I

almost any of the time. And so in order for us to function properly, we kind of have to prove to ourselves that Dengen does what it's supposed to, which is be able to externalize knowledge so effectively that we can all work asynchronously of each other. And it's been a really great way of keeping us honest in terms of, you know, are we building a tool that can, you know, successfully do this?

I think the pattern needs you to dedicate more trust to people, right? So you have to trust the people who are responsible, trustable. There was a saying, collaboration pattern of the first 10 people will basically determine the next 50 and 100, including how they will perform, how they will think. I think culture is working at this moment, but what about the team needs to be bigger and how are you going to do the hiring and what's your thought and vision?

Yeah. So in terms of hiring, it's definitely like the first people that you hire have an outsized impact because they'll hire people like them and it's essentially the bedrock of your culture. It's something that we've been pretty deliberate about as well. So we have a public handbook at Dendron where we state our values. In terms of what we're hiring for, we're hiring essentially for people who have those values or who can develop those values. First, it's this idea of like learn and adapt and

So this idea of making use of information that already exists, because that's kind of what Dendron helps people do. And this is also what we use to help us move quickly, is instead of reinventing the wheel every time, how can we take the pieces from existing concepts and lessons and apply them to Dendron? We also iterate.

And so we do two releases every week. Every Tuesday, we have a new release. And every Friday, we have an early release. So there's always stuff coming out. And we keep getting feedback from our community. Stuff like ownership-- a lot of the values that we have today, we've taken them from other places that we admire or places where things work out.

So like customer obsession from Amazon or like bias for action. For the first 10 hires, like, you know, we're looking, we have a pretty high bar. We're looking for people that can work very autonomously, that have these characteristics and that are, you know, comfortable working in our environment where, you know, we don't have

common office, we don't have a common time zone. Everything is very much like document driven, workspace driven, knowledge based driven. That's definitely a big part of our culture is this like starting from a single source of truth, which is the attention workspace that we all share and then expanding AdWords and building on top of that.

Yeah, this is very interesting. And recently, Mentaverse, this wording is very hot. And I think this is also very fit for that concept. It's just like a digital nomad. What do you think?

We definitely make it easy for our digital nomads to work in a place like Denjen. We actually have some people that are not necessarily traveling, but living in places where they otherwise wouldn't normally live. One thing that has been nice is it's pretty simple for us to onboard new people. So the hiring process at Denjen is also kind of unique in the sense that we talk to you

but we don't do a coding interview. Instead of the coding interview, we ask you to come on with us and do a few projects. The nice thing is because all the code is open source and all the documentation is already out there, we'll pay you for doing those projects. And that hires a chance to see what it's like working at Engine, working with the team, and seeing if they're a good fit. And then also, vice versa, we get to work with the candidate.

And one thing that we've been able to do because we've been onboarding a bunch of people like this is just to make sure that our onboarding process is very smooth and that generally everybody that joins Dendron has ship code within the first couple of days. And part of that, I would like to think, is because our process, essentially everything that you can think of is documented and available.

So besides for pointing people in the right direction, most of this stuff is self-serve and people can do that on their own time. If you contrast this, for example, places like Amazon or Big Tech, we had a saying that it took probably a new hire a year before they were a net positive for the company because you had to spend so much time on training and making them familiar with internal tools and coding. And right now, at Dendron...

it's about two days or one day before you can start delivering value. And so that's something that as we grow, it's something that we want to carry forward. For us, it's a huge competitive advantage, but it's also the value that Dendrim brings. And we want to be the best case study for that.

This part of this point really inspires me because in the real world, the most cases I have met is that knowledge spread cost is very heavy and there is no very detailed easy following documentation to know the latest or historical changes. So you are very easy to enter an outdated status. And if the order is still there, then that's great. You can still go to ASEAN. Otherwise, you have to pay a lot of time to practice, to work out, to test.

Overall, I think people do create lots of documentation. In my view, this is because many tools emphasize about recording things but missed out the second part, following up. And without easy, intelligent following up procedure, the consequence you now see is always knowledge, information, little bit of piece here, little bit of piece there.

So knowledge association is a very important stuff to me and I'm really looking forward to see how Dendron will improve this part. And so in the other side, I want to ask in terms of marketing, you as a founder, how do you extend its influence besides making a good product? What I have observed is that Dendron has a very active Discord channel and I joined in and found out there's over 700 people there. People do the introduction proactively and share

how they're doing their own note-taking, how they're associating their own knowledge. So which is really surprised me because what I know online is that people usually just only punch out once they have a question, right? So I also want to associate this to the photo taken in your room by the GeekWire previously. In the photo, the whiteboard is being written with a 3X times promotion. So what's your thought on brand building and publicity?

Yeah. So in terms of promoting Dendron, I think so one aspect of that you've kind of touched upon is our community. Dendron is very much a community driven product and it's something that we, I, the whole team, we invest a lot of time in. Every single new person that joins Dendron, I will make sure to greet personally in their message. Every time somebody has a question, you know, we try to follow up as soon as possible, either

addressing it or pointing them or if it's a feature that is necessary, asking them to help us put that on our backlog. But we basically make sure that everybody who joins the engine gets heard. And then if they part of our introduction template, we have people like talk about, no, what's your big pain point with note taking? And depending on that, we try to connect them with other people in the community who have similar pain points. And this is just to, and because this is, it's kind of like marketing. It's kind of like

going back to like build it and they will not come. Start a Discord channel. You don't have a community. It takes work, like a lot of work. So building up a community is something we all spend a lot of time focused on, making sure that everybody is heard, that everybody has a voice and that we continue to do things like we scope public talks

We have office hours. We do a weekly, bi-weekly vote on new features. And we have all sorts of community events to make sure that people feel involved and can contribute. So that's one thing. It's just focusing on the community because then people will tell others, tell their friends about Dendron. For most of the year, that's actually primarily how we've grown. And then the other things. So right

Now, it's an interesting time right now because we are actually making some public pushes. So up until this point, we really haven't done anything outbound marketing-wise besides posting on Hacker News. Basically, every time we've been on Hacker News, we've been on the front page. And so that's always-- every time we do a Hacker News posting, that's been a big momentary spike. But coming up, certain things that we've been doing-- we've been recently featured in the Microsoft Extension store.

And so that's been driving in a bunch of new users. We're actually going to be speaking at the Microsoft Livestream for the next VS Code release. That is actually going to be one of our first outbound things where we actively promote Dendron.

The reason we haven't done more on this front is just because we have so many users as it is that it becomes hard to support with our team. If you look at our-- you've talked about us having an active Discord. If you look on a GitHub, that's also very active.

I think we get on average four or five new issues a day. And it's usually people with new feature requests or new things that they want. In some sense, we wanted to make sure that we were set up to handle new users before doing additional outbound events. In terms of what we're doing for promotion, it's mostly just focusing on our community because we find that that's been a really great driver of

more people finding out about Dendron. And frankly, because it was hard for us to support the people that we already have. For the past couple of months, as we've been really working on building in some-- addressing the most common concerns, operational issues, so that the team has a little bit more bandwidth. And then moving forward, we're going to be doing more of these events with these other communities that are tangential to Dendron. So like the VS Code community, various note-taking communities, and just talking about Dendron and how

like you can help them in that workplace. Since this is open source, but probably you will also get a lot of the noisy, right? Because everyone can, I mean, raise their own voice. Is there any very challenging, some of the questions that I mean, really make you, you know, start to think about things or something like that, make you start there? Is there any of these kind of examples?

I mean, the hard thing about open source is just that everybody, especially if a tool gets popular, then everybody has an opinion and everybody wants something. Sometimes people want directly opposite things. And so there's a problem of features you don't have time for, features that philosophically actually don't align with your product, and everything else. So the biggest problem is just the sheer volume. It can be overwhelming.

Like I can today like no longer keep up with all the issues that come in or with all the threads that people shot on Discord. So it's like too much information in some sense. And then specifically for open source, I think different people have different conceptions of what open source should be. Like there are people on the like GPL side who think like everything that is, they have like a very strict definition of open source where like the code has to be like free from any sort of analytics and has to...

have these particular licenses or it doesn't count. And you just deal with a lot of different people. I think the biggest thing with open source is just dealing with people. And that's not bad. Everyone brings a different viewpoint. A lot of people's viewpoints help us in making Dendron better. For example, we had a blind user that very focused on accessibility and helped us point out accessibility issues that you wouldn't otherwise have found. We have lots of Windows users where

You know, initially my primary development machine was in Windows. And so they were kind of doing all the QA for Windows related issues. It's both the greatest advantage and also challenge with open source projects. It's just the sheer volume of different perspectives and different people that making sure that you can manage that and stay sane and have some sort of sustainable process for that. Yeah.

Yeah, true. If you can get super likes from the internet, then you can also get super hits. So it's always a balanced stuff. Yeah, I mean, thanks for all the sharing from how you growing up and to the startup, then to especially for the DANGERZ experience. But before I let you go, we also have a lightning round. So we have some quick questions for you. You can add more description if you want. So my first one is what's the most relaxed that you can imagine?

Yeah, this kind of ties into the question earlier about what I did when growing up. And so for me, it's like reading a good book after a day spent running in the woods. I heard you are an ultra runner. So why did you like this sport? And how long did you be ever running for one time?

Yeah. I mean, it goes back into running. I think like a lot of things in life is life can be complicated, but running isn't. You just put one foot in front of the other and you just keep doing that for however many miles you need to. For me, it was always very meditative. I could just run. I could choose to use my running time to think about something. I could use my running time to not think about anything at all. It was always very free. In terms of the longest distance I've ever ran, it was, I've competed in multiple 50K ultras. So I've

An ultra marathon is anything that's longer than a marathon. So technically, since a marathon is 26.2 miles, if you run 26.3 miles, it's technically an ultra. But normally people consider ultras in like 50k, 100k, 50 mile or 100 mile. I still have it on my bucket list to at least do a 50 mile, maybe 100 mile.

But I think I had 100 miles. It's just like, I don't know if I'm going to do 100 miles. But anyway, so the longest distance I've done is a 50K, to answer your question. Cool. So next one, this one is going to be a little bit interesting because you are growing up in different locations. What's your favorite hometown food? Yeah, so hometown, my grandmother made yu xiang jiezi, so eggplants. Fish, the English is like the fish, eggplant in fish sauce.

What kind of events that do you feel is like the battery charging to you? Yeah, so for me, I kind of feel like it's mostly the same thing. It's like I like reading some fiction, usually sci-fi or fantasy or running. I also really enjoy rock climbing for me because a lot of the things I do are mental, like physical stuff is very nice because it gets me out of my head. So running and climbing are things that I do now. Any words to describe your working or some of your leadership style?

Yeah, so for I try to be pretty meticulous in terms of like leading by example. And so like when I ask people to do things, I usually like make sure that I also do those things. A lot of the things that I ask people to do, like most of the communication I will like if it's something that I say to more than one person, I try to have it down as a principle, either like

a value or a principle, or like we have a bunch of memos inside the company. The other thing I want, I strive to be as very open and communication. So in the sense that people should always know how they're doing. I do one-on-ones with everyone on a weekly basis. And on every one-on-one, I give people feedback on what I think they're doing really great on and what I think they should focus on.

And so it's not like waiting until the end of the year before telling you you're fired, but telling you every week, hey, I need you to do better at this, but I think you're doing awesome at this. And giving people a very clear understanding of where they are, what they need to do, and how they're doing.

Anything that you want to do, but that didn't get 10 years? Basically everything. One thing with doing a startup is that it kind of consumes your life. You know, nowadays, dungeon is basically the main thing that I do day in, day out. But, you know, I'm interested in making my own furniture, building a cabin. I have maybe 10

other software projects that I'm interested in starting. I mean, Dendron alone, there are 10 different directions that we could take Dendron in, but we can't do it just because we need to prioritize. I would always, I have on my bucket list to author a book, to learn to fly a plane, but you know, all of those, I think in maybe like in five to 10 years, I might have more time to do. Very clear. So do you have any, some of the book recommendations? Yeah. So in terms of

Books, it really depends on what people are in for. For people, one book, one recent book that I started recommending is Principles by Ray Dalio. And in that book, Ray Dalio, he founded BlackRock, which is the biggest private hedge fund in the world.

And so in Principles, he lays out like, here are his principles for like living his life. And here's his principles for getting a business. And everything is like very explicit, like which I guess like goes back to Dendron and just like having one source of truth to like deciding on something once and then being able to point to that. Principles is like a good example of somebody doing that. And on a non-business perspective, Man's Search for Meaning...

by Viktor Frankl is something I like to recommend. Viktor Frankl was a Holocaust survivor. And so he writes about the difference and what he noticed about enduring just about the worst things a human could go through, the difference between people who are able to endure that and people that weren't. YUFENG GUO: Cool, thanks. The final question is, in professional or something like personal life, what is the one worst moment that you have ever experienced? ZHUO LI: Yeah, I like this question. It took me a moment to think about it.

In terms of my personal life, my warmest moment has been my wedding. So I got married about two years ago. During that wedding, we asked all our friends to... First, it was a small wedding. There were around 30 people. This was before COVID. We had all our friends be part of the wedding in the sense that two of them were doing...

like a live song. My wife had a bunch of musician friends that played like the piano, played the entering music. A friend of mine was our minister. And so he got his ministry license two days before the wedding. So he could ordain us. It was very nice just because I was, we were surrounded by the people we loved and we were all coming together and being able to celebrate with us for the wedding.

Wow, that's super super lovely and it's very happy to hear that. So Kevin, thank you for attending today and all your sharings. I really appreciate that and I'm really looking forward to seeing the future of Dandruff, the new shape of knowledge management tool for everyone.