E202: How the Largest MLOps Community Was Built

0:00Welcome to the opener startup podcast. This is Tim from Essence BC and their lovely co-host, Robbie from the Modern Technical Fund. All right, so we were having our good friend D. He was the MLOPS community founder and now is the head of developer experience of a Genetic AI Foundation. Welcome, sir. Thanks, man. I feel like I just put you through some torture having to say my full title there. No, I love it. And we have a ton to talk about because everybody who's kind of involved in this podcast listens to it is a founder thinking about open source. A lot of that is community centric and you're kind of like the community guru. So I think maybe it is to start because you have a very interesting background going all the way back to being an English teacher, building like the most dominant community in the ML space. So why don't you kind of like give us a brief background of like how you even got to be who you are today? Yes, may all those English as a second language teachers

1:00out there that are listening realize that if you work hard enough, you can make it all the way to being a member of the non-technical staff at foundation in the AI space. So I wanted to get out of the US after I graduated university or college as we call it in America. And the easiest way to do that was by teaching English. And so I jumped on that train. I was doing that until my daughter was born and I had this realization that I need to actually work all year round when I was in Spain teaching English as a second language. As soon as summer hit, folks did not want to take English classes. And of course, like I can relate with that. I don't want to go and learn a language when it's 40 degrees Celsius outside and the beach is calling my name. That didn't really jive though when I have mouths to feed and I felt this responsibility of like, I'm the man of the house. And so then I got into tech because a friend of mine was in tech sales.

2:02And he said, you might be good at this. Jumped on that train was doing tech sales until around 2020 when COVID hit, right as COVID hit, the company that I was working for was in the ML space. And it was primarily like an ML platform. And the CEO said, you know what? It would be great if we like did something around community since nobody is taking our calls. Now that COVID happened and people are having these existential crisis moments. So everybody on the team was very excited about it and that initiative and project got handed to me. And then that company went out of business like two weeks later. I was stuck with this thing where I was like, you know what? But I kind of like this whole community thing a lot more than I like sales. And I ran with it. And so starting in 2020, we just started doing as much as possible

3:03around the ML platform space. ML ops as we called it in those days. And that's why the community was called the ML ops community. And then fast forward in a couple of years and LLMs became a thing. And so we started talking a lot about those. And then fast forward even more agents became a thing. We started talking about that. And throughout this whole time, what I have loved is like this very fast feedback loop with the community and being able to gather insights from the community and then stress test ideas from community. I'm sure you all have felt this like social media is not what it once was. And so I don't know anybody who goes on social media to get like an actual opinion and really stress test their deepest ideas anymore. I think that social media has transformed into something else. And so where can we get that kind of feedback and that quick iteration on our ideas

4:04that we want to put out into the wild? Well, it's in these private user communities or public user communities, just little niches on the internet. So our listeners are going to be a lot of open source related founders, builders. But I think even increasingly, there's actually still today many, many people want to build communities. I hear different founders all the time. Like I want to build a community, I want to build a following, I want to do everything. I think it will be very useful to maybe give us a picture. Okay, how much work does it take? What does it require to get started to build a community? Because I think a lot of people just felt like they just start, I don't know, posting on X's and hackers and just show up with a discord and somehow people would just come. It will just somehow come because my project has so much code that looks so sexy. Given you start ML's community and with the foundation, what is things you learn to build a community that actually works?

5:05And what does it even mean that works even means? I think give us a little bit of picture. What does it take to start something? So I think there's different ways that we can define community and it might be worth us just breaking that down real fast because you have one distinction that I would make first off is communities versus audiences and a lot of times as a founder, it may be more advantageous for you to build an audience versus build a community because you sometimes don't necessarily know what you're getting into when you're thinking about a community. But an audience I would say is you as a founder or you as a one person talking to many people. A community is where you have many people talking to each other. So it's many to many conversations versus one to many conversations. So someone can think about this in a way of you make a YouTube video,

6:06the person making that YouTube video, if it gets a million views, that person who made that video has an audience but the YouTube comments, that's where the community is happening. Assuming that it's not just all bots trying to crypto scam you and all that fun stuff because we've all been in the YouTube comments sometimes, you can find gems a lot of times you can find scams. So that's a on the community side. B is are you talking about a community that is around a certain open source project or are you talking about a community that is around a certain idea or theme? And so like the MLOPS community would be a user community around a theme of, in the early days MLOPS and then as it transitioned it became more LLMs and just AI in production and then AI agents in production and now AI agents in general. And a community around an open source project

7:08is the community around DuckDB for example. There's a gigantic community of people that are contributing back to that specific open source project but then you also have the users of that specific open source project. So there's a little bit of a distinction there and going back to the main question of like, hey, what works when you're doing this? I will say that I can pretty confidently guarantee that if you are consistent with gathering the community even when you have a call with only three people and that happens for like three weeks in a row or three calls in a row, if you just stay on it you are going to create the vibe where you attract the people that are in it and want to be part of this community and then they can give to the community. And so where I think a lot of folks fall down is it's very hard if you have a company

8:12to know should we invest time in this or not? Like what's the ROI of doing these community calls? What's the ROI of us having someone on payroll that is interacting with the discord or slack or wherever our community lives? Or get hub issues maybe not so much because that's probably the whole team or you would hope that it's a lot of the engineers. But that I think is probably the scariest question for a founder is just like, do we continue to invest resources in this when we have three people showing up to our community calls? So I would be of the mind that it's very much a marathon not a sprint and I would not measure your community actions on a week to week basis rather like on a quarter or ideally like yearly basis. Super interesting and I like this distinction between like what are you trying to build like an audience

9:12or a community because I actually think a lot of founders don't know and probably can answer that. But maybe just to like set context for folks the ML ops community is massive I think like almost a hundred thousand people in it. Been around for like five, six years. Can you talk about like your own community building journey? Like why did that even get started? Because there were other ML communities out there like what were those not serving? And then like how you even started it? I think for me the catalyst was that we had started it for the company that I was working at. That company went under. I realized I really like creating content and talking with people to learn. And so in those days I didn't have a LLM to talk to to learn and I would do the thing that we traditionally do where I talk to humans and I ask them questions about how they're doing what I would like to know about and what they find hard, what's interesting,

10:12what are some gotchas. And then we were just putting that content out there and creating calls where people could come on to the calls because remember in the early days it was COVID. Fast forward to when it really got going. Then the best thing I think that I can say is that I didn't know anything about this space. So I couldn't answer people's questions. I had to just have a role that acts in my head of people that I wanted to start having conversations. So if a question came up it wasn't like, oh, let me give a stab at how I would answer this. It was, I just talked to somebody a few days ago that was talking to me about something similar. Let me see if they might know the answer to this. And so maybe it's I tag them in a thread or I make an introduction or I do something along those lines.

11:13A lot of what I do and did is just connecting people. Hey, this person I just talked to they are working on XYZ. They were looking for somebody in this space and you came to mind. So then you want to talk to them. Great. Here, there's the connection or just like an user name and Slack. Do you have any advice for this question? And that's really interesting because I think a lot of people think of a community. It's almost like a broadcasting. It still feels like an audience when I join a discord. Like here, here's my latest release, my product, can I do show and tell, right? You know, or something like that. So there's a little bit of interaction. But like you said, you're like, it's a much more almost like joining a club or joining a family per se. Right? Like, okay, you should get to meet other people. Right? This place is yours. So divide. Does that mean you pretty much have to meet every single person that joins and get to know them and get to know exactly what they're doing? Like that doesn't seem very scalable. Yeah.

12:13But also maybe that is the way to build a community is to do things and unscatable. Like I wonder, like the journey from maybe talking about being a journey from like zero to some number that you're personally doing every single thing. And what is the next thing up that you start to need to have like team members, other people doing what I think I'll be very interesting to kind of see that structure changes and how your approach also changes as well. The thing that took up the most amount of time was just taking the weekly calls and then putting them on to YouTube and getting the description and getting the title and uploading it. Lucky for us now, you could literally just give that to codex or cloud code and let it do everything for you, which I have been doing recently and it is incredible how it can go through and upload it directly to YouTube. And so that was what was killing me in the beginning. I remember especially because I wanted to make clips of the videos and this was before the vertical clip era.

13:14It was just, hey, there was this great question or there was this great slide. I really liked this idea. And so I was making a lot of those clips. And I was also actively reaching out to people. Because remember, I came from sales. And so I was now just changing what I was selling people. I wasn't selling people a product. I was selling them, hey, you should come to this community because we're talking about XYZ. I think you might like it. And so I was actively reaching out to people. I was seeing some people were coming in. I was trying to get to know those folks and see what they were working on. We were doing like surveys. What are you all doing? What's like top of mind for you? That type of stuff. And then I had some friends who were good at automations. So we would do things with automations where, hey, if you want to come and you want to chat with me for 15 minutes, then I had an open calendar and I just had a calendar link for anyone that joined the community.

14:16And it would be like the welcome message was, hey, I'm Demetrius. I'm super happy to have you here. I would love to chat with you and hear what you're working on. This community is great. I think I've polished that welcome message 10 times more since which is I share a little bit about myself. And then I asked them what they're working on. So it's like now my response rate in the community when someone joins is absurdly high compared to the past. So the current message is, I'm Demetrius. I started this community in 2020. It's grown a little bit since the five engineers that originally were here with me. And because now it's like whatever, yeah, in Slack itself, I think there's 35,000 or so. And I'm still excited to hear what folks are working on. So what are you up to these days? And it feels very informal. It feels very like, ah, Demetrius has taken the time to chat with me. Although most people know, I think that it's an automated message.

15:19We still get incredible amount of responses. And going back to, sorry, I'm not sequential at all in this like, what was it like when we first got the first person? I think the first person that helped me the most was a VA. And I got someone to help me just like with all the scheduling of podcasts or scheduling of community call guests and scheduling for virtual things, like setting up the call and setting up the emails. And we started to create like processes. Hey, before the calls, we send out an email reminder after the calls. We send out, here's what we talked about. And again, this was pre-LLM, so it took a lot more work. Now it's kind of like this stuff is a little different to set up. But it still is quite useful. And now I think the key is not necessarily if you do it, it's how tastefully you do it. And so instead of just spamming out a AI overview,

16:21maybe it is trying to add a little bit of spunk to the prompt so you don't just have the AI overview. It's that you say, I really like to have my overviews in this voice or whatever, this type of thing. And I can give you some examples of that later on. But the other things that are really valuable, again, I said that anyone could chat with me. That helped me learn a ton about folks in the beginning and just why they were coming to the community. It helped me realize that there was kind of like these four buckets that people were coming to the community with. And then I could build what we were doing around that. And so the four buckets were, you're either like looking for a job or trying to hire. You are actually just trying to meet people and find a place where you can hang out with like-minded folks that are interested in the same thing as you. You are trying to get people to use your product.

17:23And that is one where you have to have like an escape valve for folks in your community if you want that. And the last one was learning and meeting people. I think learning and meeting people I kind of conflated as one. But meeting others slash learning. It's so interesting because like there are some parallels to like company building here too around like when founders get to detach from like their users and what they actually care about and why they're using the product. I'm curious if like so you talked really about all the little things, like consistency, doing the events, like even when people aren't showing up. Do you, when you like think back to the early days and why the community grew so much, was it just the consistency and how long did it take? Like was it like four or five months of like you and the five others and then it started to take off or like it was just a bit by bit. It kind of kept growing and then you know people would hear about it because other people were in it.

18:23Exactly. I think it was more of the latter. It was very much like hey we're doing this. I was always actively trying to help spread the word. So I think one of the biggest realizations that I had was at some point I stopped doing outreach to folks about the community in LinkedIn. And I was expecting that now we wouldn't see any new people join the cause or join the slack or join the email. Whatever it was, I thought it was all going to drop off a cliff. But it didn't. And so then I started questioning like, well how much is my outreach actually working? But the thing is that you get to a certain point and people start talking about it for you. And that's much more of a forced multiplier than what you're as one person able to do. So I think we really want to make sure we talk about the Agente AI Foundation. So I know it's part of the Agente Foundation, I regret it correctly.

19:23And you're not under the rule. Tell me so what is Agente AI Foundation? What is the mission for and what is your role? What is how to develop your experience even do here? Yeah. So the foundation is where I think the biggest project that you've probably heard of that is inside of the foundation is MCP. But it is where we're building the Agenteic stack and helping all of the open source software that's out there. Find a solid like Stuart and home to live much like the CNCF did for Kubernetes and all of the DevOps projects around that. We're doing for the Agenteic world. And the wild thing is it's like the fastest growing foundation ever. I think now there's over 200 members of the foundation. There's an incredible amount of energy around it because agents and AI is pretty hot these days.

20:26And so the thing that you don't necessarily have are a lot of standards and a lot of projects that are open source that are like Keystone projects in the whole agent world. And so we're trying to help out by being that steward and being the place that can be a home for all of these projects. And one that I mentioned that's probably the biggest is MCP. We just had this huge release kind of parties across the globe yesterday and two days ago because MCP went stateless. So we wanted to make a bunch of noise about it. And now my new role is very much like fostering the community that was already there with the MLObs community that kind of like transition evolved into the Agenteic community. And then leveraging now like I've never had so much energy and interest in something to where now it's like, oh man, it's overwhelming how many people are just doing stuff with that.

21:36And they're writing about MCP or they're writing about some of the other projects like obviously agents.md that's one that is popular and then you've got goose. And it's wild because we put out a call for ambassadors and we had over a thousand applications to be an ambassador for the Agente AI foundation. So that kind of stuff I've never seen before that kind of like interest and energy is unreal. And so it's up to me now to be like, alright, what are we doing with this? How can we harness this? How can we make sure that folks are just having an awesome time? I think one thing that I come back to time and time again is like, can we make sure it's just like good vibes? That's key. And that's a little hand wavy. But like, can we just have a good time while we're doing this stuff that is quote unquote work? Yeah, I also think that like over time where communities can fall down is like, it stopped doing fun or just like starts being too like ops heavy or too many people.

22:46And it's hard to like scale and make it fun. So I'm curious, I'm sure a ton of startup founders come to you and are like, hey, I want to build a community. I want to hire a developer experience lead like can you talk about what I like the bones of like a great community. I know we're talking about this before we start recording, but like where you're like, okay, yeah, like there's something here where you could build a community around it versus someone who you know there's not a lot there to work with. I think first off, a lot of folks that I talk to don't realize the kind of investment you need to make. It's usually not enough to just hire a community person. That's where I feel like most folks heads go when they think about, hey, we need a community. I need a community person. What I like to think about and advise folks on is you're better off thinking about like the team. And how can the whole team work towards making sure that you have a healthy community and it should be everyone's job to foster the community.

23:50It's not just one person's job to foster the community and just like hang out in discord or slack all day. And that's like now their job description. How do you even write a JD for that and interview for that for that matter. Give me a break. So the way that I have built teams in the past for this and also like just told folks to do it and seeing it work best is that you try to cover the actions and activities that help foster and build communities the most. So when I say that I mean kind of like bucket into a few different places. One is content and content here is very much like developer content. So it is not marketing really like marketing can own the case studies and marketing can own the website but like the content of deep, deep technical stuff. Maybe that just means that folks that are the developer content team they're working with the engineers to extract stories on how you're building your product or how this open source product is working or they're working with the community itself to extract those stories.

25:06And then you put it into different mediums. So it's not only like I have a content team and that content team is now expected to do all mediums. You get to or your head of developer experience developer relations developer advocacy, whatever you want to call it. They get to decide what the strategy is if you want to go hard on video I should say or if you want to go hard and written form which we all know is a little bit of a gamble these days considering the slot that's out there. That's a whole different conversation though, but they get to decide like we want to extract these really deep technical conversations or insights or stories and then put them into different formats. Maybe it's podcasts, maybe it's videos, whatever. Then you have your like events pillar you want to be out there doing events and speaking to the community in person. And so maybe it's virtual events maybe it's I would definitely not recommend only doing virtual events, but I think you can get a lot of bang for your buck with virtual events.

26:13I just think that you also want to be there in person maybe you're putting on workshops maybe you're doing meetups maybe you're going to other people's meetups or you're collaborating with other teams all of that. So you have an events person or a little bit of somebody's time that is dedicated towards events and all of that like if done correctly. Should be fostering the discord and slack that's happening right and so you're meeting people out there by creating this content and having that be like the kind of the magnet that brings people towards you and then you're continuing the conversation and you're going to be there. So I think that's the kind of conversation in the conversation in the community and I think Tim you said some earlier that's another easy downfall is just viewing the community as a broadcast channel. There's nobody that wants to be on a broadcast channel community who like joins the community is like great. Now I get to be marketed to in this very novel form that is pinged on discord. I don't know anybody that but what I do love to see in the community is like you were saying to how are others using this product.

27:22Can I meet somebody that's in my region and now like I've got a cool new friend or like I grabbed coffee with this guy I met in the community and then we ended up starting a company together. Like that's awesome stuff. That's what like the power of community has just the kind of bridge to get from M.O.O. to the AI world. M.O.O. off spack of the day is for technical nerdy geeky people like us right you know writing cold cares about what pie torch does you know you can still debates between this and that little pipeline thing. But you look at the AI agentic MCPs all this world the whole world. I think I probably have one of my my relatives mentioned MCP to me that's not going to do in tech. That's incredible. So wild right like the interest level is just so much more crazier than ever. And I wonder given you see a lot of different companies trying to create the next standard trying to create a neck MCP or trying to like even leverage MCP to be in their company value prop.

28:28What are some of the things you've seen people done well in today age you know or do you see any differences like okay this might used to work back in M.O.O.O.P's times. But will not work here or now when it comes to trying to build let's just say even the audience or community I mean I'm wondering if you've seen any like devices or even examples that just might keep you keep trying but just doesn't work. I think these days what you see is that there's so much more noise in the space because the aperture has expanded and so we've opened that up anybody can be part of this whole AI revolution. And it is causing a much different problem than before because before it was a little bit like oh well if you hear about this kind of nerdy geeky thing and you're into it it's an easy sell. Now it's much more like wow I'm getting flooded with every piece of content is related to AI in some shape or form so what works now that I've seen and I really appreciate is when folks can tell more of a story around what they're doing and I was literally just watching some great YouTube videos from the guy who created polsa.

29:55Have you seen this his YouTube channel it's Ben Sarah I think is his name he has some incredible YouTube videos about his journey creating his product polsa later you read the comments and it's like the product isn't that good but whatever he's got the attention. And so there's a whole debatable thread on you know he's really one of those guys that is die hard on I'm a solo founder solo company like maybe you might want to hire some devs because the feedback and all of his videos he gets hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube but all the comments are like this product is such a gimmick there doesn't work I've never tried it so I can't say if it's good or not it's just what I see. But what he does really well is he has an incredible story and people can jive with that and what I've seen again like I was very hesitant in the past to talk about and almost like quote unquote bragg or just name drop about.

31:03The ML ops community and what we're doing because in a way that's like my product and I don't want to just talk about my product all the time and I was of the mind that I would rather just talk about the people behind what is happening. But now I've seen that folks really appreciate if you document your journey and if you can capture this story element and make it interesting in the way that you're telling a story that folks can latch on to it's like human nature that we can't not come along for the journey with you. And I remember reading a book a few years ago what is it like story worthy or story form it's by Matthew Dicks I think and it just it's great to help you realize like some key points about telling a good story. So that's what's working I think that doesn't necessarily translate to all right cool now you've got this great community or you've got this great audience but it is definitely something that you should be thinking about and I know that it's like kind of easy to say oh just tell a story tell your story some tangible things that you can do for that and that I found have always worked for me or document don't create.

32:23Like you don't need to necessarily feel like you have to create something because that can be very daunting what you can do those you can document what happened to you yesterday and so as a founder you're constantly going on calls or you're constantly maybe you're going to events and you're learning things or you're thinking about things and how you're translating that to your products that is what you can document and talk about with the world. So closing the loop on the thread of like I didn't want to talk about the M.O.O. community here that gives you a pass like you can talk about what you're doing because you're documenting your journey as you're building it. There are so many good pieces of advice in here usually our last question is like pieces of advice to founders here in this case want to build a community but I feel like you hit on so much I know you have documents that you send people looking for advice and communities so maybe we can include some of those links in there but thank you so much this was awesome we could have talked for another full hour I can't believe how fast I got to bypass the last question black is going to say if you do have a final there's so many negative advice in here but if you do have a final like take away piece of advice for founders specifically looking to build a community that we haven't covered will definitely take it recognize what you mean and what your goals are with the community first off and then also recognize that it's probably going to cost you and take a lot more than you would expect if you want to do it well.

33:49That's the second thing that's probably the TLDR don't go into it half-assed and then feel like our community didn't work for this project it's something that you have to spend a lot more time than you think on with a lot more patience and also to spend a lot more resources as in people and probably money at the end of the day. Also will just save for folks who want to learn more than they can read the docs that we like share but also if you are an am I engineer and you definitely check out am I off community but also like some of the biggest projects are now under your foundation so i will give a shout out to because we're doing some incredible events we have global meetups happening continuously and probably just about every city i opened up the meetup ambassador thing this is different than the. Ambassador program we have a community events program organizer and we got over 500 people to apply for that and so from like Melbourne to Nairobi to Amsterdam to San Francisco there's community events i've been strongly advised by our lawyers to not call them meetups because meetup dot com has that copyright and so they're not meetups there community events.

35:08And the other thing is that we've got awesome conferences and like many forums that are happening across the globe to so there's mcp dev summit that i'm going to in korea in two weeks there's mcp dev summit in agent con in japan in september 11th that i'll be going to and then in Amsterdam september 17th we have agent con and in san jose we have agent con in october. So anybody that wants to come join me say hi and i would love to chat with you more about. agents or community because we didn't get into any of my thoughts around the agentic revolution or all of the fun stuff that are happening with agents right now and how that's changed things but we'll save that for another episode. Thank you so much for doing this with us yeah thank you all as a long time listener first time caller i'm deeply grateful that you had me on here.