CD201: MATT HILL - START9 - FREEDOM COMPUTING

Happy Bitcoin Tuesday, freaks. It's your host, Odell, here for another Seal Dispatch. The show focused on actual Bitcoin and freedom tech discussion. I always skip last week because I had a long week in Vegas for the Bitcoin conference, but I'm back at home, ready to roll. Vibes are high. Good to be back with you guys. We have a great chat lined up. But before we get there, huge shout out to the freaks who continue to support the show with their hard earned sats.

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favorite guest episode in a while. Well, that's a big endorsement by Pseudo Carlos. If you haven't listened to the last episode, go back and listen to it. Freaks, today is Tuesday, May 5, sixteen hundred UTC. The current block height is is the current block height is nine four eight zero four nine. Sats per dollar is 1,225, and we are pumping. Bitcoin is at $81,600. As always, share the show with friends and family. All relevant links are at citadeldispatch.com.

Search Citadel Dispatch in your favorite podcast app. Thank you all. Guys, we have returned guest, good friend, co founder of start nine, Matt Hill. How's it going, Matt? Hey, man. Doing good. How are you? Pleasure to have you. You don't you don't seem so excited. I'm I'm livid. Why are you livid? Well, I guess livid's probably the wrong word. I'm raging in the best way possible just at the world. Alright. I like that. Building with our friends, and

this is it. This is the time. This is the moment. I'm aligned with that. That's my style. Channel the rage. Make it productive rage. Yeah. That's great. I'm happy. You know, I'm happy guy. Love it. You're bullish on Bitcoin? No. Do you you wake up with a pep on your step when we were over 81,000 this morning? I want to feel bullish on Bitcoin, but I don't. Matt is Matt is start nine is a ten thirty one portfolio company. We are the largest investor in start nine,

and we hold a retreat for all the founders we invest in. You have to be the only way to get invited as an annual retreat is if we choose to invest in and support your business. And one of our annual rituals is Bitcoin price predictions after a few drinks because why the hell not? And Matt was the only person in October that was correctly bearish on the price. So take that as you will. But it's actually because

at least in part of those price predictions that I became bearish. Right? I was one of the last people to predict and everyone else in the room was calling numbers between like two hundred and five hundred k. And by the time it got to me, I was like, oh, fuck. We've topped. And we were at like Because you guys all calling crazy stuff. Yeah. We were at $1.20 and I was like, we've topped. And and what was your prediction?

I I said we've talked. I I think it was one twenty five. Gave us a number for next October. Right? Wasn't that what everyone that's what we were saying? Yeah. I said I said it was we've already hit it. I said it was 01:25. We've never looked back. We've gone down since. So you haven't reversed now? You're gonna I don't know where we're going right now. I'm neutral. I'm not bullish. I'm not bearish. I'm neutral.

Fair enough. Okay, I'll take a neutral neutral mad Hills is a is a bullish mad hill. Mostly not paying attention. Fair enough. Just focused in your lane. Yeah, I got my own world, know, Bitcoin is important, but adjacent to what I do. I think since we already brought up ten thirty one, interesting place to start before we start diving into your actual

product, I mean, where we're at and what's coming. I think it's all very exciting. I think a really interesting aspect of start nine is that you are building out like a fully MIT fall stack. So to the freaks that aren't aware, MIT is the most permissionless license. It's like you literally can do anything with the code you want to do, you can monetize it, you can distribute it, you can modify it.

And historically, long term, like historically, particularly coming out of Silicon VC tech land, open source in general was discouraged because it didn't have the lock in, but particularly MIT open source where literally anyone could do anything they want with the code was incredibly discouraged.

And one thing I take a lot of pride in with ten '31 is that while a lot of people run away from open source, we run towards it, we think you can build very profitable, ethical, sustainable powerhouse businesses on an open source foundation. Obviously, you're the one actually building start nine out. How do you think about that aspect?

Well, there's a few layers here, many of which we covered in a, I believe, three hour long Citadel dispatch, three years ago, where I was on one side of a debate against I think four people. You did well. At me. And it was because we had a, noncommercial clause attached to our source available license, thus disqualifying it from the strictest definition of open source. And on that call, I defended

what we were doing as a strategic play, not a permanent state of affairs. Right? And whether the strategy was necessary or not was up for debate,

but I tried to make it very clear to everyone that we we were very much in line with the principles of open source so much so that we didn't even like GPL because it is restrictive in that you cannot do whatever you want with it. And the only way to enforce those restrictions is via the violence of the state and that we didn't like that, but that we were moving towards a fully open future for the company in a strategic manner that aligned with the business goals. And people just couldn't wrap their heads around this idea that you can be principled and strategic,

that you don't need to be where you wanna be immediately, that you can get where you want to go eventually. And that's how we do everything here. And so, yes, I mean, from a from a base, philosophic, and principle standpoint, information is and should be recognized as free. It is free. We need to recognize that it is and live in accordance with reality. Trying to violate the rules of reality

can only be done via the use of force from a practical standpoint. IP never really did anything for people anyway. Right? Maybe for a a brief moment in time, but when it came to software, reverse engineering things was always very feasible for anyone who had a decent team and a little bit of capital, and now it is trivial. Right? Code is effectively free. I can't imagine putting writing software that is closed source and thinking that it does anything

for you. You get none of the benefits of open source, which are numerous, and you get and you still are gonna get your code copied if someone wants to copy it trivially instantly for free. So, you know, you tell Claude reverse engineer this. You take a look at this. Don't make it obvious.

Or make it obvious doesn't matter as long as you change the language as long as you you know I mean? Like, it's not gonna be bite for bite copy. So, software is is cheap and free. It always has been, but now it's really cheap and free. And so why not be open source? Right? It's not only is it

true in essence, it's good in principle, and practically speaking, you get a lot of benefits by being open source. You get the open source community, you get open source contributions, bugs are gonna get found faster, etcetera, etcetera. Okay. So I mean, with the investor hat on, I'm about to take the investor hat off, but while it's still on, so then how do you make money in that situation if the code is free and open?

Yeah. Mean, so take any traditional business in this world, Right? Like, let's just do a quick hamburger stand here. You can slap a patent on a particular recipe of your hamburger, but we all know that that's not what makes the business successful or not. What makes a hamburger business successful over another hamburger business is full spectrum of user experience, quality of the product, customer support, brand, trust.

Right? That's how we've always, as humans, had to compete in business. This idea that you can think something up and then point a gun at everyone else saying you can't do this because I don't wanna compete with you, not only, again, doesn't work, but it's quite quite cowardly. So we just compete. Right? Like, we know that StartOS, as proud of it as we are,

is not and could never be our competitive advantage. Our competitive advantage is our brand, our customer support, the quality of our hardware products, our warranties, ancillary services. So we're just gonna do good old fashioned business. And I know a lot of VCs are afraid of that because they want a cheat code. Right? They want the the shortcut and the easy button or some narrative they can sell to the next round and exit themselves. We appreciate you guys in that you seem to legitimately

not seem. I know that you legitimately want to support businesses that are doing good things for the world and will make you a lot of money. And we are both of those. Love it. So, I mean, the the the key the key product here historically has been start OS, start start nine box, self hosting. I mean, you said Bitcoin is is just one aspect of your business. And I I take that as meaning that the key the key thread here that is start nine is trying to help people

self host more of their lives, and Bitcoin is one piece of that. I think a lot of the freaks are obviously familiar on are probably very familiar with StartNine and StartOS. I run one myself. I actually, to the open source piece, didn't buy hardware from you. I flashed my own hardware with the OS. I think me and you have been for years, you more so than me because you've been building out Start9, but very focused on getting more people to self host things and move away from the cloud.

Since we last spoke this year has probably the most viral electric moments for self hosting. It's like every I mean, specifically on the open clause side, mean, we saw people go out and buy $600 Mac minis very excited to buy to start self hosting. And to put aside with the validity of why they were doing it or how they were doing it.

Just the excitement around it was something that was very unique to that I had never seen anything like that. Like that was very optimistic to me. What has it been looking like from your perspective since you've been a foxhole yourself? There's a lot to unpack there.

Yeah. So, know, our essential thesis back in late twenty nineteen, once we fully understood what we were, what we were setting out to do, was that self hosting, right, open source self hosting open source software was going to not only be popular but necessary in the future because we identified problems with the current model of computing.

Right? The as broad as a statement as that is, like, the way people use computers on Earth, we identified irreconcilable problems, problems that cannot be solved from within the paradigm, and therefore came to the conclusion that either we stick with the paradigm and the problems become existential over time, or we switch the paradigm. And when you set out to, you know, build a business around a thesis of a paradigm switch in how people use computers, it's it's audacious.

Right? Like, we're crazy, but it sounded fun. And I've always wanted to do something cool and important. And so, basically, we we saw a we saw a horizon where people would

want and eventually need to switch to self hosted solutions and decided that we were gonna be we're gonna help that. We were gonna not only build the foundation and the tools that make it possible for people to do that, but we were gonna provide the education as well. And so I come on shows like this, and I speak at conferences to try to help people understand what the problem is with the current information systems on this planet and how what we do is part of the solution.

And so it's nice to see to see it working. Right? Like, not only are our products working really well and people are appreciating them, which has been really rewarding, But the understanding is starting to spread now too, and we have, in large part, the the emergence of AI, of agentic systems. Right? Personal assistance that are intelligent and connected as a,

quote, killer app for self hosting. Right? Bitcoin is a killer app for self hosting and is one of the reasons why out of the gate, we were leaned so hard into Bitcoin. Right? Not only are we Bitcoiners, not only do we recognize that Bitcoin is a necessity in a fiat world and that if you don't fix the money, nothing else is gonna matter. But we also recognize that for the first time almost ever,

normal people wanted to run a server. They didn't know they wanted to run a server. They thought they wanted to run a node.

But you need a server to run a node. I guess you don't need a server to run a node. You could run a node on your laptop and close it up and not have it run twenty four twenty four seven, but nodes are better if they're always connected, especially if you're using, you know, lightning and other services. And so Bitcoin was this, like, was this kinda backdoor into self hosting. Right? It's the orange pill that leads to the red pill, and we're the red pill. And once you catch it, once you understand it,

it becomes a little bit of an addiction,

which is a good you know, like, it's very rewarding to take back control of your information systems. I remember in the very early days, a founder who is no longer with StartNine, when we had our first device, it was a old little Raspberry Pi running a super, you know, 0.1 version of StartOS, and he he showed up the next morning and he was like, I was laying there last night in bed, and I looked across the room at this little device and it had a a little light on the front of it.

And he's like, and I just felt so cozy and powerful knowing that that thing was working on my behalf while I was sleeping, keeping my things safe. He goes, I think we really have something here. Fast forward six years, and I think that people are starting to recognize and appreciate that feeling of independence, of control, of power, especially with AI. Right? It's not just about privacy and control anymore. It's about power. You can you can build

cities now. Right? Normal people can build digital planets, and the question is, are you doing that for yourself? You are you doing that for someone else? Right? Everyone can grow food now, so it's nice to have a good garden. Would you agree though that the AI pieces, like, compared to the Bitcoin piece, I feel like it's accelerating self hosting movement significantly?

I think it is, but it's also doing it in a much more confused way. There's a lot of confusion around confusion and misunderstanding around AI systems. You know, people think that by buying a Mac mini and installing OpenClaw on it and putting in their Anthropic server that they're doing local, you know, local

AI stuff, and they're not. Right. Like, all your entire file system is being shipped off to Anthropic servers. It's like the ultimate invasion of privacy. Right? At least in the previous, you know, cloud computing v one, you had to explicitly put information into a UI that was connected to a third party server. And so whatever you typed into the Google search bar, for example, you know was recorded and

being watched. But now when you put the AI on your computer and plug it into an inference engine, right, the the LLM provider, it goes the other direction. Basically, like, you're you're opening the door. Right? You're inviting them in. And so everything about you is now totally exposed. And so it's very dangerous. It's a very dangerous move. And I think it's really important to communicate the subtlety and nuance of these systems to make sure that people understand how to do it

properly, how to do it safely with minimal loss of power. Because there is going to be some loss of power if you abandon, for example, the latest state of the art third party LLMs. Right? Like, not using Opus four seven has its own trade offs Right. Costs. And so you need to know when to use it, how to use it, and when to not use it, and how to use alternatives. And it's just not super democratized right now. People don't fully understand all that.

And there's just to your point, I mean, there's so much nuance there that it makes it complicated for people to kinda grok comprehend. Yeah. We have to productize it and make it make it obfuscate the understanding to a degree. Right? Like, education is great, and I support the educators. I am a bit of an educator myself, but, you know, however much information someone wants, they should be able to obtain in the most consumable way possible.

But at the end of the day, most people will not seek information or understanding. They will simply use products that do what they want, and so we need to make sure that our products are efficacious, easy to use, and also inherently

private and secure, which is what we are working very aggressively towards right now. Not only, you know, with the latest start OS, but a whole bunch of stuff. We're doing more right now than I ever thought possible at this time, to be honest. Our timeline has accelerated dramatically.

Yeah. I mean, what what I always say is I love BT sessions. I just did a panel with him in Vegas on the main stage about Bitcoin as freedom money. He does great education work. If someone if something requires a two hour BTC sessions video to use in the best with best practices, we've already failed. There's only a tiny subset that will go through that process. Like you need well designed ethical products that actually

have sane defaults that actually move people in this direction. Otherwise, we'll never hit any kind of sovereignty scale. And it sounds like you agree with that. Yeah. And this is why we have a fighting chance also. Yeah. Right? Because most of the people and companies in the world that are both capable and willing to pursue, you know, the products that we are pursuing are not

principled. They have their own principles. Right? They they are not the principles that we share. Right? They are building a with them in the middle. Right? Everyone wants to harness this and control it for themselves and basically just double down on the cloud computing model. And we are one of the very, very few teams in the whole world, organizations, companies, or individuals. There's like

single digit numbers of people or companies working on what we're working on, and I think it's the winning model. I think it has to be. Otherwise, it's kind of a kind of a horrifying future. Right? Like, as we move into a world that is connected with robotics, powered by AI, if individuals and families don't have absolute control over those robots and those AI information systems, then it really just it it is sort of the the the despots

wet dream. Right? Like, you you could end up with a world where really small numbers of people, potentially even one person, has has control over an entire nation and in ways that were previously never imaginable. Right? Like, we've seen dictatorships throughout history, but Right. It always required some degree of, like,

loyalty and chain of command, which is why they always went, like, total schizo at at by the end is because they couldn't trust anyone around them. But that's because those people were humans. Right? We now live in an age where you could end up with a a dictator that doesn't have that problem. And we probably will. I'm sure. I mean, it'll definitely happen in some parts of the world. Right. Hopeful that it doesn't happen in The United States because, you know, we're sort of the

we're sort of the beacon on the hill and have been for a few hundred years. And I think it's important we keep shining. Yeah. But there's even here, like, probably the realistic scenario is, you know, in America, what we like is the what we like, what we run on is like this tech oligarchy, this sort of like this, like, private public private partnership scenario, where you have the big tech companies, in particular, doing a lot of the surveillance and control mechanisms,

people tend to opt into them rather than being forced or coerced into them. And then they, in turn, collaborate with corrupt politicians. I mean, the example I like to use that maybe is a little bit more benign of an example, but is really important to me as a father is family photos. Right? And I take my children's privacy very seriously.

And to your earlier point, when someone is uploading their photos to Facebook, they know they're sharing it with Zuckerberg, they know they're sharing with a bunch of big tech companies. And people still do that, which is part of my belief that, you know, an overwhelming majority of people probably will do this and the things we're building are for the

the sovereign few or the ride or die minority, however you wanna put it. And the key is to try and get that number up. But with these AI tools, if you just tell Claude to organize your photos on your desktop, the person in their head isn't thinking like, oh, Anthropic is getting access to all my family photos, like it's not clicking in their head, which makes it even more dangerous.

Yeah. That that, you know, is what I was saying earlier is Yeah. It's not obvious that you're putting information into a third party server when you're running these local agents. So it's it's people have demonstrated, in my opinion, an inability I'm broadly speaking, people. Right? Demonstrated an inability to to think indirectly at all. If there's one degree of indirection, they can't see it.

It it has to be obvious and in front of your face. Like, there needs to be an input and it needs to be like, you are handing this information to Anthropic and it needs to have a warning too. If any of those things are missing, then they assume it's private. And so, yeah, it's it's it's a product it's a product race. But like you said, you know, I've been disillusioned a bit with my perception of humanity in terms of what people,

broadly speaking, will do to preserve their own freedom and lives over the past few years, especially. I wouldn't call myself a cynic. I think humans are glorious, and I think that that many of them are are just the most admirable outstanding beings in the universe. And but for being realistic, the world is not designed for, you know, free thinking, critically thinking,

free humans. We are almost in every nation around the world trained to be not that, and human nature is very susceptible to these types of tactics. And so the reality is that we live in a world where most people will not reach for their freedom. They will not do anything that requires critical thinking, judgment, or effort even to preserve

their their lives. It's very authoritarian based. People look for authorities to tell them what to do, and if they do what they're told and they die, then at least they can scream, it's not my fault. Right? Well, as they're dying. And there's a few of us that take responsibility for our own lives and for the lives of our loved ones. And I think it's really important that we have the tools to do that effectively.

And that is where I focus is not on the everyone, but on those who are willing to get onto a lifeboat. I think it's important that they have lifeboats, that we have lifeboats available. And so we build lifeboats. And I think as problems get worse, we will see the number of people who are willing to, you know, who have sort of reached hold on a second. I got a barking dog in the background. You're good. He spotted an enemy

traversing our house. Okay. So as the problems worsen, more and more people will, one, recognize that there are problems and reach their own threshold of intolerance and reach for solutions. And so, you know, from a business standpoint, that's a huge market. From a human standpoint, that's a lot of lives. And at the end of the day though, like you said, even if we don't get quote, like, mass adoption

Yeah. In a in a high integrity way. Right? Like, is Bitcoin gonna garner mass adoption? Yeah. Is it still gonna be Bitcoin? I don't know. Right? Like, is, you know, custodial, intermediated layer eight Bitcoin Bitcoin anymore? No. Right? Just like gold isn't once it's been, you know, theatized. And so Bitcoin will garner mass adoption. I I think that's a pretty safe bet. Will it

provide the world with the freedom it promised? I don't know. And we'll see. Right? We're gonna fight for that just like we fight for the broader computing paradigm. But the reality is is that even if all that happens, right, even if cloud computing sort of wins the day and centralized control over information systems increases and Bitcoin goes total custodial intermediated fiat,

and, you know, it's abstracted three layers away, we're all trading paper Bitcoin that's hyperinflated and all the rest. Even if all that happens, I still think that building what we're building is going to be important because the few people who do adopt it without compromise, who use these systems, including Bitcoin, not at layer eight, right, but at layer one or two in private ways, and who use sovereign computing, who leverage the tools that are available,

will at least have a fighting chance of saving everyone else. Right? Of of mounting a resistance in the final moments. Right? I know it's it's a bit sort of like Hollywood or, you know, but I think this is how things work. I it's always been a few very passionate, very intelligent

fighters who have held the line for everyone else. Right? It's never been the masses. And so that's who we build for. That's who I build for. Right? In in the in the in the final showdown, will the fighters have the tools that they need to mount an effective resistance. And

if the answer is yes, then we can, you know, things will degrade as they do, and eventually, they're all it'll come to blows and we'll see what happens. I don't want that to happen. I'm a very peaceful guy. I'd love for all of this new technology that just blows, you know, wealth and prosperity and freedom all over the world. Right? Bitcoin and AI by nature are just freedom, prosperous technologies. I would love for them to just be, quote, permitted

to do what they do. But I don't know if the I don't know if the authoritarians are gonna do that with they're not just gonna roll over, you know. I'm not optimistic that they're not gonna put up a really nasty fight. Yeah. I mean, I think to your point, like, it's not cynicism. It's it's being realistic and pragmatic. And I think it's important for these conversations are important not to

discourage people. I think it's the opposite. I I think if you don't set expectations correctly, and you don't operate under valid assumptions, then you're just then you're gonna get burnt out. Then you're gonna be disappointed. Then in ten years, you know, looking at, you know, if if in ten years if in ten years, 5% of the world population is on self hosted sovereign tooling, that is a massive win. But if you set expectations inappropriately,

then you could end up in a situation where you're at that 5%. And somehow you've blown through all expectations that I currently have. And then you're disappointed in it because still the majority of people are using controlled and surveilled alternatives. Yeah. I mean, there's something to be said for creating noise. Right? So if we can get, like, white noise. Okay. So, like, if we can get

5% of the world, it is a massive number, you you know, you're putting out there. If can get 5% of the humans that use computers on Earth to be doing it in a self hosted, to be running open source self hosted software on their own servers and connecting to it from client devices for their friends and family, we can get 5% of the world doing that, then

those people aren't necessarily the fighters I was talking about. Right? That's like it's like two standard deviations out. It's like this extremely small group of people that are gonna actually fight in the in the showdown. But if you have this first standard set of deviation, right, this first set of people who are using this to preserve their privacy, to avoid censorship,

to save costs, to secure their information in a better way. Like, they're not fighters. They're literally just trying to live peaceful, dignified lives. They actually provide the smoke screen and the noise for the fighters. Because if they're if the only people using Tor are literally the people that, you know, a totalitarian government is identified as terrorists

or something like that, then they have no chance because the signatures are there. Right? Like, you're still using an Internet service provider. You're still using infrastructure that can be broadly surveilled even if it's encrypted, even if it's onion routed. And so you can leave these fingerprints everywhere that can lead to your demise. But if there's a lot of people, if you normalize the use of privacy preserving high security, dignified information systems,

then you've you've created a enough noise that the few fighters can can hide in it and not get called out. And at the same time, you've created a private,

you know, uncensorable dignified existence for the other millions of people that have adopted it. So it's win win. And so, yeah, we make products that can absolutely and should be adopted by wonderful, normal, peace loving people who just wanna live a private dignified life, but I also keep in the back of my mind that those people adopting this technology may indirectly be a strategic play for a less, you know, desirable circumstance where certain people need to go underground and fight.

Yeah. I mean, a less extreme but existing example we see of that in the Bitcoin world right now. CoinJoins. I mean, CoinJoins, there was an attempt there was an attempt to add the noise element and normalize them that I think failed partially because of apathy, but also very aggressive government response. But the win, by the way, that no one talks about is Square launching payments on all of their point of sales, defaulting to Lightning.

And as a result, because it's defaulting to Lightning, Square and the merchant has no idea where that UTXO history. They have no idea of that Bitcoin history. Now, the overwhelming majority of people that are going to their local square shop and paying with Bitcoin for a coffee might be using a strike

or a cash app or something like that that gives them no privacy. Obviously, they're trusting a third party. But that the the the few that are going there and paying with Zeus or paying with Phoenix or something

are getting significant privacy gains under the shield of the greater the greater noise that's happening in terms of people making those payments. And I think that's been a I mean, it's early days, but you can you can categorize that as that type of win. Yeah, of course. I mean, it's it's just normalizing the use of cash. Right? Like, if everyone in the society is using cash, then obviously,

some people could use cash to, you know, do things that might not be legal. I'm not saying immoral. I'm just saying, like, all of this conversation is under the sort of backdrop of a runaway totalitarian government. Right? Like like, we're doing things that are good and wholesome and absolutely within, you know, moral natural rights might be illegal. And so if everyone in that society is using cash though,

then you are able to do those things effectively. But if nobody's using cash and you're the only one, then you walk into a store and you try to use cash and it just sets off all these alarms. So, yeah, privacy is normal. Security personal security. Right? Not not where you're trusting someone else with your security or trusting someone else with your privacy, which is really just called confidentiality.

Normalizing this stuff is really important, and there's a lot of angles by which you can do that. Right? There's the the sort of philosophic angle. Right? You have to convince people, including people in positions of political power, that privacy is good. And we have foundations for this. There are multiple many organizations around the world whose mission is to normalize

privacy. You know, it's not that you have something to hide. It's that it's none of their business. And then you have product companies, and then you have educators, and so we gotta hit it from all angles, and my angle is predominantly the product, the technology angle. It's I think that we need to make privacy, security, disintermediated, non custodial technologies and products easier to use because they are traditionally very, very hard to use and required enormous amount of expertise, time,

or money. And if any of those is too high, then nobody will adopt them. And so that's what I spend my days doing. It's just trying to lower the bar, barrier to entry, raise the bar of quality and lower the barrier to entry for uncompromising freedom tech.

Love it. I mean, so on that topic, on the topic of the tools you guys are building out, you guys have been working for years to build and ship o four o, which is arguably the largest, the biggest, most significant release in your company's history. I'm running o four o. Why should people be excited about it? What is why should they care? So nobody, including us at the beginning, under

stood what we were actually building. Okay? Like, because it hasn't been built before. We were setting out to build something that had no real precedent, and that was the codification of a Linux systems administrator. Right? We were trying to take what was an advanced high experience skill set, Linux systems administration, how to own, operate, maintain server infrastructure, and turn that into code so that everyone could benefit from that

skill and knowledge and experience. As though you were had one of these people sitting next to you at your desk telling you which buttons to click on the command line. Like, what if you could have that? Right? Would that be valuable? Would it be valuable to you if there's this crazy experienced dev hacker Linux sys admin sitting next to you telling you how to take total control of all your information systems? And we attempted to build that in the form of an operating system.

And so that is a that was beyond what we expected. We didn't know how hard that was gonna be. K? Because it's easy to bootstrap something like that. There are tools that exist that get you to step one. So step one of being a Linux admin, of of, like, self hosting your own in information systems is installing the software and running it. And that's easy.

Right? That's not a hard problem to solve, to be able to basically plug in a device, select some piece of software that you want, click install, and have it install, and then run. Classic app store scenario. Yeah. And so, that was kind of step one of the problem was, okay, how do we make it easy? Rather than sending somebody to a GitHub read me, where they follow command line instructions to install and run something, can we turn that into a button from an app store?

Took us like two months to solve that problem. No big deal. Right? Umbral solved the same problem. They were a little later than us to go to market, but we had the same idea at the same time, basically. And they kind of I don't wanna say stopped, but but that

was kind of the that was their end game. Right? Was to make it really, really easy for somebody to discover and install and run a piece of open source software to self host that on their own server, and to do so in a very, you know, pleasurable, streamlined way. But that's like a small portion

of what it means to be a Linux sys admin. That's the easy part. Getting a piece of software installed and running on your computer is easy compared to what comes next, which is maintaining it in perpetuity. Perpetuity. Okay. Because servers are finicky. I mean, you have examples of large companies with billions of dollars and the best biggest engineering teams in the world, and their servers go down.

Happens all the time. And why does that happen? Because there's a lot of moving parts and software sucks. All software is crap. Right? At some level, it's all shit. And so it doesn't work. It's just like everything else in the world. Right? It just requires ongoing maintenance, dependencies break, networks go down, a lightning bolt strike something and fries that it's like the number of problems that are going to happen with your server are

not infinite, but a large set. And so what happens when something goes wrong, when something doesn't go perfectly, or even when you just wanna make a change? It's not even about when something goes wrong. It's like, what if you just wanna change the settings? Right? How do you do that? If the answer is you have to get on the command line and open Vim to edit a YAML file, and don't, you know, don't put a comma in for God's sakes, because the whole thing will explode and you'll have no idea why.

So we approached this problem holistically. We were like, we've really we mean it. We're not just here to bootstrap people onto self hosted open source software. We're here to empower you to use it forever. And that was a problem we were unprepared for. I mean, we have expertise. We we are these people, and and we build ferociously. And nobody has really attempted to build what we built, and so we underestimated how difficult it would be. It took us four full rewrites

of the operating system to get it right. We scrapped v one and came out with o point two. Huge improvement. Scrapped o point two, came out with o point three. Really good system.

Actually, held up beautifully for three years in the global market and very few problems. I mean, people were effectively self hosting for years with v three. We scrapped it, deleted it. We didn't preserve anything. We didn't build on top of it. We realized that we got some things wrong and that it wouldn't scale to the infinite number of use cases that people are gonna want in the future, like robotics and AI. Right? You wanna be able to connect all these smart systems together on

private networks that span the globe and you wanna do it in a way that is totally censorship resistant, totally private, totally free, totally under your own control. And we realized that v three wasn't gonna get us to that to, you know, the dreamland. We realized it wasn't gonna take us all the way. It was only gonna get us to three fourths of the way. And so we had to rethink the whole damn structure.

And thank God that we don't have sunk cost fallacy around here, and that we have tolerant investors who, you know, understood that we weren't just trying to cash in quick and that we were trying to build something that to last. And so we did it. We just rewrote it. And so o point four, from a UX standpoint, actually shares a decent amount of what you got in o three. It's not like you're gonna update o four and be like, oh my god, I'm totally lost and disoriented,

like that we we did a lot right with o three. It was a really good operating system. But o four solves solves everything. We we think that we have now the foundation, the operating system that will take sovereign computing to any place it wants to go. There's nothing we can't do now. There's nothing we can't encode. If your service, your piece of open source software has some crazy, totally new and unprecedented

kind of need where every time it starts, it needs to connect to TOR, but then actually connect to I two p, but then somehow resolve a domain name that, you know, kicks back and asks the user four questions that they need to answer. Otherwise, the whole thing explodes. We can encode that now. Right? There's there's like no there's case we can't accommodate, or at least that we nothing we've encountered so far.

And we've we've done a a lot. Right? The marketplace is now expanding at a unprecedented rate. We've made packaging services really, really easy, especially with a, you know, AI support. It now realistically takes anywhere between five and thirty minutes

to go from piece of open source software out in the world that I and others might wanna use on StartOS to fully packaged service for StartOS listed on the marketplace. We can get it there in thirty minutes now for most services or less. And this is not even require you to be like an advanced developer. This is just using our SDK and and OPUS 4.7 fully contextualized with templates that we provide, and minutes later you have a service on the marketplace.

So o four o is reliable, it is fast, it is, it has fail safes all over the place, it is feature full, but more than anything, it it is like a rock. It is very, very flexible. Right? It can it can do whatever the open source world needs it to do. And now that we have that, we get to down to go do those things. And I'm not just talking about more services. I mean, expanding into new devices.

Right? We get to now have fun. We get to connect our world because the server was the necessary prerequisite. Right? It's the brain and data store of the whole system. If you think about your computer systems as like an organism. Right? The server is the brain. And now we get to, like, go have fun. Right? We get to build limbs and play with toys. So I mean, obviously, you've

this release, you're calling zero point four point zero. And when you speak about it, it kinda sounds like a one point zero release. It will be once Yeah. Once we've battle tested it. Right? We call it o point four as opposed to one point o strictly as a defensive branding

or, like, trust approach. Like, don't We're not ready yet, basically. Yeah. Like, in theory, it's it's ready, but you gotta like take you gotta you gotta we need thousands of people using it for a couple of months so that we can flesh out all of the lingering inconsistencies or small bugs. Like, it's production ready now, and we haven't even launched it to production. So not only is it 0.4, but right now it's 0.4

beta dot eight as of today. We just came out with beta dot eight. And so once that's out of beta, then it'll just be zero dot four. But then we'll stay there for a little while until it's like, I mean, until you can punch it with a, you know, you smack it with a sledgehammer and it doesn't break, then we'll call it one point o. But yeah, by the way, freaks, if you want to update to o four o right now, you have to just flash a USB drive. It's relatively straightforward. There's Matt

hasn't made the quick and easy update button live in the in the UI yet. So you have to manually do it. And a little fun story there is I texted Matt asking him when he was gonna do that. And in the most loving, disappointed way possible, he he he basically

responded in a way that made me go to the store and immediately get a USB drive and flash it because he he kinda made me feel bad. But what did I say to you? I don't know. It's just like disappointing. It was like, it was like, Odell, like, we're waiting. We're waiting that we're making sure that when everyone presses the big update button, it doesn't break things. There's a lot of moving parts here.

You can flash a USB drive and and use that to update and don't be lazy, Matt. I actually say I went to the store. I didn't go to the store. As soon as I read that text message, I ordered a USB drive on DoorDash. It arrived like a half an hour later, and then I I upgraded. Yeah, if you want to update anyone listening, go to docs.star9.com. Click the updating to Oh, four o guide. Follow it step by step,

and you'll have a good time. It'll work. And it's way better than o three five. Way, way, way better. It really is. And it's stable. I use it for multiple production servers. Like, it is it's ready to very stable. Yeah. So are we gonna release are you gonna release the big button to update soon? Or Soon. What are we waiting for? Soon. Soon. Okay. We need more test cases. Fair enough. Yeah. It's really stable, dude. It doesn't feel like known reason.

Right? It's that I want I want two weeks to go by where there's no issues reported. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And then and then I'll enter I'll put the big button in the UI. I mean, free, like, the mental burden thing is real with self hosting. It's not just like, stability is not a nice to have. And I'll go back to the same example.

You know, if there's three hours of me trying to troubleshoot why I can't access my family photos, like, there's divorce on the line there. Like, my wife my wife will fucking kill me. And, yeah, you probably can you'll probably be able to sort it out if there's an issue, but those will be a long three hours. Right? And I think as people move more and more into self hosting, and move more of their lives to it, then they're going to really rely on these things. And you got to remove that mental burden. Stability is like the single.

It's like the white whale too, because it's really hard to objectively measure. Well, what is stability? Stability, redundancy Yeah. Accessibility. Right? Like, you need to be able to access your information from anywhere in the world. Like, the cloud computing paradigm is awesome. It's awesome. We don't we don't have to think about anything. Right? You just you go anywhere in the world and you have access to all your stuff,

and you never even it never even crosses your mind that the data could go missing. Right? Like, because you just trust and know that these companies are just backing it up on your behalf, that their server rooms are guarded and gotten good at it too. Like Yeah. If there was a massive issue with Apple Photos or whatever, iCloud Photos, like that would be people would freak out because they they've just come to assume that

things match. Mean, you remember when we were growing up, like you would lose files and stuff. Like you'd forget to save like a Word document or something and you like lose it. The overwhelming majority of population now that they're in the cloud, the they can't even comprehend that. Like young kids now, like they can't even comprehend losing file history. It's absolute magic. Nobody thinks about how it works, and we can't expect them to. Right? That's the point. I'm all for the education,

but I'm not banking on it. Right? What I'm banking on is that we can provide a near user experience to what the cloud model provides. We can never match it one to one. There's a fundamental extra part required to self host. Right? It's there's no way to get rid of it, which is basically you can't lose your master password. You can't you can't lose your keys. That's kind of the the one thing we can never

overcome. At least, I haven't been able to think of a way that you can do that without re centralizing control over over the whole thing. So if the one thing that we need to educate on and normalize is holding private keys in a very secure effective way. And Bitcoin, Noster have done a lot to educate at least some people on what are what is cryptography and how do you hold keys properly. And so that is one thing I think that needs to be normalized in widespread education. But otherwise,

I think we can match the cloud computing user experience. I think we can re obfuscate the server. Right? Because originally, like you said, there was computers and we had to use them. And then big tech came in and they were like, no. No. No. No. You don't need to do that. We'll run the computers. You just use remote controls,

and we can make these remote controls, like, really, really easy. We'll we'll take on the burden of running the servers, which is where all the data are processed and stored. Right? Those are the real computers. Everything else, your laptop, your cell phone, are mostly just remote controls for those computers. And they obfuscated the server away. People don't even know what servers are. They don't realize that the whole meat of the operation is happening remotely somewhere else. It's just magic.

So now we're reintroducing servers, bringing them back into people's homes, but we need to do it in such a way where the server is still invisible. It needs to be more like a router. It's like just something you just sort of plug in,

and then you open up your phone and your laptops, and you're just doing cloud computing. You don't even need to know that it's all it's all happening through this device in your house or through some uncle Jim. And I think we yeah. I think we're getting really damn close, actually. My my family, my wife, and some extended family and friends were using they're all using servers, private servers that I run, and none of them none of them skip a beat. They're just using their phones and laptops like they always would, except they're connecting to private servers instead of

third party cloud servers. So we're getting close. Yeah. So the big piece there with the o four o update that I just want to highlight is if you're using, if you're, if, if you're using your home server at home, that's always been a relatively easy connection problem to solve, right? You're on a local network, you have pretty much direct access to your home server. The hard piece to solve was the seamless I'm traveling around, I'm on my phone, I want to be able to access these things.

Historically, you've relied on Tor for that. That's just a horrible experience. It's, you know, it's optimized for privacy, not for performance, you have a lot of latency. It's just it's it's a substandard experience. You use you use iCloud, and it's fast as hell and performant, then you use Tor, and it's it's garbage. You guys have implemented two different I believe it's two separate pieces. Right? It's start tunnel, and then a proxy service.

How do you think about that? How does that change how people interact with their servers? Yeah. I mean, so the the problem, succinctly defined, is access. How do you access your server remotely? You go anywhere in the world without without introducing an intermediary, right, without compromising the essential characteristics of the system, which is privacy, censorship, resistance, security. So we, you know, thought long and hard, and we realized that

one size fits all wasn't gonna work, that we really people need to choose because all of these things have trade offs. Right? Like, you wanna connect to a server, there's a few ways to do it, there's trade offs. And we don't wanna present too many choices because that creates decision paralysis. So we wanted to do the, you know, like,

three here's three ways you can connect to your server, and here's why you would wanna do each of these ways, and here's what the trade offs are. And so, at present, those three ways to connect are Tor. This is for either public or private access, meaning you can publish a tour domain, like, can host your blog on tour. Right? And it's that

space. Yeah. It'd be a way to anonymously, right, or mostly it depends on whether some whether you share the tour address from your identity or not, but it's a way to anonymously or pseudonymously host websites on the dark net. Or you can just use them for your private access and don't share them with anyone and nobody even knows that they exist. So this is for private or public remote global access where privacy and or anonymity are the paramount most important considerations.

What the trade off is is like you said, it's slow, it's unreliable, it is incompatible with many remote controls, cell phones, laptops, and certain applications that you're gonna run on them just won't use Tor or won't use it properly, and so user experience degrades further. Option two. And this is for private remote access. Right? Not public, just private access from anywhere in the world, and this is using a VPN. Right? This is a standard

technology. It's becoming increasingly normalized to use VPNs for outbound traffic. Right? For, like, you're using your remote control to access the Internet, and you want to hide your IP from the websites that you're visiting, that's how most people use VPNs. But you can use VPNs for the opposite direction as well. Right? You can use VPNs for inbound traffic. Right? We could think of it as reverse tunneling as opposed to tunneling.

And so you can go anywhere in the world and then using your phone or laptop, access the server in your home in a way that it is not exposed to the Internet. It's not it's not using Tor. It's not exposed to the Internet. It's using a personal VPN for private access, and it is very fast. And there's two ways to do this. One is that most modern routers

have VPN servers on them. These are aftermarket routers, not the one dropped off your by your ISP. Right? This assumes that you've Right. Leveled up and gotten yourself a real router, which everyone should do. And it runs a VPN server, and so you just turn it on and install an app on your phone, WireGuard,

install WireGuard on your laptop, and then you go anywhere in the world and you it's basically as though you're home. Right? You have access to your LAN, your local area network of your home from anywhere in the world, only from authorized devices, which means you could give friends and family some limited access as well using the same technology. So if you wanted to, for your company or for your family,

right, it takes a few minutes to set up. You have to get everyone's phone, everyone's laptop, and you have to install the app and then copy paste a config file in and click save. It's a few minutes. It's not like a heroic weekend long journey. It's a couple minutes. And you and your whole family are now connected from anywhere in the world to each other and to your home as though you were all in the house together. Okay?

The second way to do the VPN, if you don't have a modern router with a VPN server on it, is Start Tunnel. StartTunnel is something that we built out of necessity because we realized that not everyone would have router with a VPN server on it. And there's a second reason for StartTunnel as well, which is is the third way to access remotely, which I'll get to in a minute. But you can and should think of StartTunnel as a virtual

private router. VPR, I coined the term, Start Tunnel is the first instance of a virtual private router. You, again, should think of it as a router, except it's not a router sitting in your storage room broadcasting Wi Fi to your home. It is a router that runs in the cloud, right, on any VPS that you can rent from a VPS provider. There are many of them. And you rent this computer, right, that's running in the cloud, and you install

Start Tunnel onto it. And what you have done is you've turned this computer into a router that is running remotely away from your home. It's not a full featured router. It's not a WiFi router. You're not producing WiFi networks from the cloud. Right? That's but it does certain things that routers do. Namely, is it allows you to create LANs. It allows you to create a VLAN, a virtual LAN. Just like the router in your house creates a LAN for the home,

you can create as many VLANs as you want using Start Tunnel. Each one represents officially called a subnet, but each one represents a different house, basically, in the cloud. Second thing that you can do is add devices to these VLANs, just like you would in your house. Somebody comes in your house and asks what your WiFi password is, you give it to them, they have joined your LAN. With start tunnel, you can add devices

to a LAN, and this is done using WireGuard and reverse tunneling. It's very easy to do. Same thing that you would do on your home router. You basically you go to your start tunnel instance. It's already running the VPN server. So unlike your home router, you don't actually need to, like, turn on a VPN server. It's inherent and running automatically with start tunnel. All you need to do is add devices.

So you get yourself a start tunnel, a VPS, install start tunnel, and then you go around your friends and family and you add, you know, my laptop, my wife's laptop, my phone, my wife's phone, my my kid's laptop. You just add all these things in. Put the config files in everyone's phone. And now, you and your family, or you and your business, the individuals can go anywhere in the world, and they're all connected to each other through this virtual LAN that StartTunnel created in the cloud.

And then that LAN, right, assuming you say say you have a server in your house, you add the server in your house to the LAN of start tunnel. Right? So now the server's on two LANs. It's on the LAN in your home, which is created by the router, and then you add it to the LAN in the cloud. So now your server's on two local area networks. And so if your devices, your cell phone and your laptop, are also on one of those LANs, it means that when you're home, you're connected to your server on the LAN.

And when you go somewhere else in the world, you're connected to your server on the VLAN. So you're always at home with your server, no matter where you go in the world. Right? And this is what Start Tunnel one of the things that Start Tunnel does. Okay. That's number two. And it's the optimal choice for private remote access for you, your family, or your business. That is the optimal one because there's no compromise. The only trade off to that strategy

is the initial setup time. But you have to actually add the devices to the LAN, copy paste the wire What is the trust you're putting into the server in the cloud? Is is that just uptime? These these VPS providers have, like, 99.99% SLAs. Like, they don't go down. You're not there a trusting privacy, like, tracking concern? Nope. They see here's what they see. They see a server that has electrical signals flying in and out.

Right. They don't have They have IP addresses, but they don't know what traffic is. They they know where the Right. Those electrical signals are coming from. Correct. Yeah. So it's it's and some of them require a degree of KYC. It depends. Right? Like, obviously, if you're using your credit card, then but it's, yes, it's a trade off. So the optimal thing to do is to use your home router. But even then, you're exposing the exact same information to your ISP.

Right. Right. So we've talked about this. I've talked about this before. Eventually, eventually, we need to take on the big boss. Right? Which is the actual meatspace infrastructure and how the Internet is generated through fiber optic cables and towers. Right. But it's not necessary right now because there's so much noise. Like, works. Tunneling works. Right? We can use their foundation of the Internet

to do extremely private things. Eventually, we need to redo the Internet, like Yep. In the form of mesh networks and bottom up grassroots, you know, towers and cable laying and all the rest. But, like, again, it's not a battle for today, and it's not doesn't need to be. We shouldn't even be focused on that, in my opinion. Okay. So number three, and this is the exciting one. Right? This is the one that if we're being honest, most people are going to use is just clear net. Right? Just

meet people where they're at. Like, how do you use the Internet? How do I use the Internet? How do we all use the Internet? We use even in we even call it the Internet. Right? It's it's Clearnet has become synonymous with the Internet, and they're not really the same thing. Right? Like, the Internet is a word that describes something a little broader than what I would call Clearnet. But Clearnet is a combination of TCP IP and the DNS system,

and the certificate authority system. Those are kind of the three pieces that I would identify as Clearnet. So TCP IP is an information protocol. Right? Two is DNS. So domain name services. So the way that you com.net, these human readable domains and how those resolve to IP addresses. Right? And then three is certificate authorities, and this is how encryption is done and it's all a trust based system. So we decided to enable people to utilize this system called Clearnet

from their home servers and to make it as streamlined and easy to do as possible. Like VPN, there is a small degree of initial setup. It's not as much initial setup as VPN, but once it is set up, there is nothing you have to do from then on.

It just works. Right? Like, anyone on earth, including you, including your family, including your business, can just open up any browser, any client, any application for the phone, and utilize the resource that is offered by your server, whether that's a website, an API,

a node on a network. Right? Those are sort of the three broad categories of what you can do on a server. Right? You can do a web service, you can do an API, or you can be a node on a peer to peer network. Those are the three broad categories.

Regardless of which one it is, you are just gonna plug and play with the rest of the world because the world operates on Clearnet for the most part. So we have created, I think, an incredible Clearnet story with o four o. You're talking a couple of clicks, clear instructions, and boom. Your business is running on cloud.mybusiness.com. Your passwords are at, you know, passwords.mybusiness.com. Your blog is at blog.mybusiness.com.

So you can just build out effectively your own little corner of the Internet that's running on your own server and replace SaaS companies one by one by one. Right? Like, ultimately, if people take nothing else from this entire conversation here, I would want them to take this, which is self hosted open self hosting open source software services on your own server on Clearnet is a fucking decapitation move of the entire software as a service Silicon Valley hegemonic

monster that has emerged over the last twenty years. Like, all the things that we think of when we say big tech and invasion of privacy and censorship and costs and oh, there's been another breach and all of this shit can be roughly encapsulated in the scammy, sell to the next dumbest investor and eventually dump on the public's head VC driven centralized information system that Silicon Valley has turned out over the last twenty eight years is completely

decapitated and made made impotent and useless by individuals, families, and businesses putting a server in their home, installing open source software on it, and hosting it on the public Internet. Gone. Take Zoom, for example. Okay?

Massive company. Zoom's not even a company. Aren't they owned by Microsoft? I don't remember who buys who anymore. It's all one giant company under the hood anyway. But they're not owned by Microsoft, but sure. Zoom is a massive company. Huge valuation. I don't know what it was. It's in the billions of dollars. Right? Obviously, that's easy nowadays. So what does Zoom do? It allows you to do meetings. Right? Remote meetings, team meetings,

video conferencing, chat, the whole deal. Right? And it can even record things and store them for future use, analyze them with AI, whole deal. And they are doing this. They're spying on all your calls. We with o four o, you can I wish I could just do a demo here, but I'll

I'll put a video on X? I'll do a screen recording and put it on X of how to eliminate Zoom from your life and make the company obsolete in ten minutes. K? That's what I'll just call the video. You can, in a few buttons on StartOS, produce a self hosted alternative to Zoom so that you and your friends and your family and your colleagues and your work can do video conferencing together exactly in the same way that you would using Zoom with no loss of user experience, no added effort, nothing,

in about five to ten minutes on your own server, and it works flawlessly. I do all of my team meetings, all of my family calls with my parents. This is Jitsi. Yeah. But but, like, Jitsi is notoriously difficult to set up and get working properly.

Right? Like, you have to you have to do the the the video turns you have to do the turn servers, you have to set up the UDP port forwarding situate, like, up a self hosted Jitsi that actually works and you can do meetings with, 50 people and stuff like that, it's like good luck. I do this from my house now with a button. It's nothing. It's so So we have, as of today, eliminated the reason for Zoom to exist in the world, and yet it is nobody is doing it,

and millions and millions of people are still using Zoom. Yeah. It's a $32,000,000,000 company. Changing behavior is hard, But the more Zoom spies on people, the higher their prices go, the more people who will be like, how do I how do I not use Zoom? And they might platform hop to some other thing that spies on them and charges them money. But eventually, given enough time and enough pain and enough information available, I think people may discover

that they can just do it themselves. It's like imagine going from restaurant to restaurant to restaurant. Everywhere you go they poison you. Every single time you go out to eat, you end up vomiting all night long. At some point, you would hope, right, that people would go, maybe I'll just cook. Maybe I will cook a meal at home for myself. And then when they do it, they realize there's these things called ovens that make it really easy. Like you don't actually have to like make a campfire.

Right? Like you can you can do this. It's easy and it won't make you vomit all night. And so that's where we're at with this now, is you can think of, like, Start Nine and Start OS and all the things that you can do with it as not only cooking for yourself, it's actually bigger than that. Growing your own food, but using modern technology that makes it easy. You don't need to be an expert farmer. You don't need to be a chef.

Just grow your own food and cook it for yourself. It's like a button here and a button there, and every all these restaurants just die. Die. Wouldn't you love to see that happen? It's like an old fashioned hanging when the guy was actually a bad guy. You know what I mean? Like, I would love to see and witness and be a part of the mass execution of these Silicon Valley SaaS companies. I just they do not belong on Earth. They have no business. I'm down. Let's kill them all.

So, I mean, that sounds awesome. Option three sounds by far the easiest. What are the like, what is the trade off there? Why would someone choose option one? You know, they're running a VPN on their router versus option three where it's just built in clear net support on their server? These these sort of two trade offs, I'll call it, to option three. One is that you are losing a degree of privacy by engaging in the DNS and certificate authority world.

These are these are worlds that are based entirely on top down trust. So when you register a domain name, they need your address, they need your phone number. If you lie to them, you can go to jail. Like, it's like a serious thing registering a domain name. Right? Like so when you put your website or your personal file storage system on Clearnet,

you are advertising the value you're doing this. Yes. You you are announcing that you're doing it to everyone and everyone on earth. This is not like subpoena stuff. This is like pleb stuff. Everyone can see that you are doing this if they care to look. Right? So that's number one. Number two is a degree of security. Right? When you put something in a public square and everyone can see it, it's possible someone's gonna attack it. Alright? Now now application

security is pretty damn good. Encryption works. Rate limiting works. So the idea that somebody's gonna visit your, you know, personal cloud storage website and brute force your password is probably pretty low because, hopefully, you've chosen good passwords and using a password manager, but there's also built in, you know, rate limiting into almost every piece of software that you could install.

And we think a lot about stuff like this. We remove the foot guns. Right? When you when you self host open source software on your own server, there are a lot of ways that you can fuck it up. A lot. Even very experienced people leave doors open. And this has been one of the things with like Open Claw, you know, when people are like, I got my Mac mini. I'm like, build out digital worlds for myself and, and it's like, backdoors everywhere, like, know, security vulnerabilities,

leaks of privacy. And so we think that StartOS is actually the ideal system for agentic development because it has all of these guardrails and protections and best practices built in. Right? So for the same reason that a human running bare bones Linux to self host all their stuff is gonna make a ton of mistakes, spend infinite amount of time, and it's not gonna work anyway.

Same thing with an AI. Right? Like, AIs are gonna screw stuff up on a bare bones Linux system as well, not as much as a human would. But because they're building so much more and so much faster, the the net destruction could actually be greater than if a human was doing it because at least they're doing it slowly and can't blow it all up at once. So StartOS, I think, can emerge as, like, the preferred operating system of AIs.

Because it's like, we we have all the recipes for them to accomplish what the user wants, but with assurances that it will be done properly and work well and not leave security and privacy gaps all over the place. But anyway, if you put something on Clearnet, you know, you're setting up a booth at a public market. And if you're only using it for yourself, like if your intent is not actually to distribute things in that booth, then why'd you put it there?

Right? That's kind of question. Do a friends and family VPN at that point. Yeah. It's like if you want to put a website, like your ecommerce store, that needs to be on the public internet. Otherwise, people aren't gonna be able to access it. You can't be like, oh, I'll get a v like,

you don't want them to have VPN server access to your land. So if you're gonna, you know, maybe can't expect them to use Tor, otherwise, you're not gonna get any sales. Exactly. Tor is good as a fallback in case of censorship. That's what Tor is useful for. So if you have a blog, for example, you put it on the clear net, and you also mirror it on the dark net. So that way, someone censors you, then you get to go on social media and be like, they censored me. Check out my censorship resistant alternative.

And now, not only did your website survive, but you're also really cool. So, you know, that's what Tor is for. But you wanna sell stuff or you wanna you wanna have a blog, you know, that belongs on the public Internet so that people can actually access it. But if you want your, you know, your passwords and your private files and your family photos and stuff like that, why put them on the public Internet? You know, you can.

And in almost all cases, you're not gonna get attacked because nobody cares about your website. Again, application security is pretty robust. So the idea that someone's gonna brute force their way into your private photo, you know, website is minimal. So realistically, look, like I said, even for private access, most people are gonna do Clearnet because

it's just so damn easy and convenient to do. And I'm not gonna I'm not gonna tell them they're wrong. I'm not. Is it slightly less private and less secure than private VPN access? Yes. But in reality, is that gonna be used against you? Probably not. Makes sense. I mean, like, this conversation, I can I can chat with you for hours, but I'm trying to be conscious of time here? And there's two more pieces I wanna cover

before we wrap. Do you sell hardware on the website right now? You sell the server one. Twenty twenty six server one. But how should people think about if they wanna they wanna start self hosting, how should people think about buying prebuilt hardware from you versus either buying or recycling older hardware and installing StartOS on it? The principle at stake here is how mission critical is it? K. So if you're playing around,

you don't need it. You know, you can use a piece of crap and or a VM even within an existing laptop, you're just playing around. But if you're planning on setting up, like, mission critical infrastructure for yourself, your family, or your business, you need really high quality hardware. And so you should not skimp on that. If you have really high quality hardware already,

then just flash start OS, and you're good to go. There's no reason to buy from us. If you don't have quality hardware, we sell some, and we sell it at a very reasonable price, especially considering the current costs of SSDs and RAM. We're actually very competitively priced, significantly cheaper in fact than, you know, even people that are doing the same thing as us like Umbral,

and was a much more powerful device, by the way, and we're still cheaper. So, yeah, we have great hardware. We warranty it. It comes with a two year warranty,

which is uncommon, and it also comes with access to our support, which is a private support server. This isn't like some public channel on Telegram where scammers and spammers are gonna be trying to fish you at every at every turn. We have a private support server that's gated to and is only accessible by paying customers where you can come in and ask questions day or night and get one on one support

from highly qualified technical people that start nine employees, and your device is warranted. So buying from us has huge benefits. Warranty, support, high quality hardware, great team. You're also contributing to open development of an important piece of open source software in start OS and others as well.

So, yeah, I'm happy when people buy from us, but you are in no way obligated to and I'll give you a high five if you if you don't do. I don't care. Like, just take control of your information. Yeah. I will say the hardware is incredibly competitively priced. I mean, four terabytes SSD, 32 gigs RAM, Ryzen seven, twelve ninety nine, I mean, I think SSD freaking. That SSD is on Amazon for almost $700.

Yeah. It's a Hardware is crazy. Right? Samsung Evo Plus four terabyte NVMe SSD. Go look it up. Almost $700. Just for the SSD. Yeah. So it's very competitively priced. We're not cutting margins here. Putting my investor hat on, are we charging too little for that hardware? No. We're good. Don't worry. Okay. Sorry, freaks. Goodbye before I encourage Matt to increase the price. We're we're here for the the long run, you know. We're not gonna penny pinch right now.

No. I agree. I'm I'm mostly kidding. I know. Okay. On the hardware piece, you've teased it. It's now public information. You guys are coming out with a router. When will we get it and why people should be excited about it? And third piece, are you currently on the router right now? No. Okay. So I'll I'll do them in order. Alright. So years rewind a few years. Okay.

We get asked all the time, which router should I get? Because some people realize that just accepting the router that is dropped off by your ISP and for which they charge you $10 a month for, by the way, is just a horrible decision if you care at all about privacy, security, and cost. Like, why would you pay $10 a month for something that, you know, can be bought in many cases for under $200? And why would you put a knowing open

access point and backdoor into your entire home? Right? Busy spyware.

It literally is. These routers just give blanket visibility into your entire LAN. They could see every device on your network, how often you're using them, what they're connecting to, like, everything is just crazy that people put these backdoors in their homes willingly. And so some people realize this, and they know that they need to get a different router. They need to tell their ISP to take a hike with that thing and go get their own router.

And so they were asking us constantly, what router should I get? And so we take customer support really, really importantly, and we ourselves were asking that question of ourselves. Like, we were comparing routers and setups, and so we we just pavement bound it. We tried a bunch of different routers, and, you know, each of us kind of, I like this one because of this, and that one's more featureful, but it's harder to use, and this one has a interface from 1992.

And so, eventually, we just realized that routers We realized that there was no really good router on the market, that the the trade offs were way too much. You want something really powerful, it's unusable. You want something really usable, it sucks. It's not powerful enough. And there was no good balance. Nobody had managed to create a good router. And so we're like, well, maybe we should make a router. So we set out to do it almost obligatorily.

I wasn't I wouldn't say we were excited. We were like, alright. Well, we're gonna build a router and we'll see what happens. As we got into designing and as I learned more and more about networking, because I'm not formally educated in, like, networking. I'm not a network engineer. I'm an application developer.

I realized how cool routers were. You know, like, me, like everyone else, is sort of this black box that makes Internet happen in your house, And you don't realize what's happening under the hood and what could be happening if you were if you knew what they were doing. And I was like, oh my god. You can do a lot of really cool things with routers around privacy, security, access, control, right, being the overarching concept, would say, is just control control over information,

over how information travels around and who can see it and when they can see it and all the rest. And so I started to really fall in love with routers. It's like, oh, this is a cool device. Nobody ever told me. And then as we designed it, because we weren't tainted by preconceived user experiences or interfaces, we we got to start from first principles and just create. So I was like, alright. What is a router? Right? What is the essence of a router? And what we decided is that it was two things.

It was your gateway. It was the thing defending your home against the brutal outside world, against the Internet. Right? And it was also your gateway to that world. Right? This is the gate, the giant doors to the city. It's like how you get in and out of the city, and you want it to be really secure. You want the border to be secure. Right? So that's number one is that it's a gateway. And number two is it is a police force.

It's local domestic security. It's like this is the thing that controls all the movements within your territory.

Which devices can see which devices, what they can do, how they access the Internet. Right? Like, all of these things. And so it's it's both a guardian and a a traffic controller. Right? It's the thing that sets the rules. And so we came at it from that perspective. We were like, oh, we can create something really cool using those themes. Right? Like, how do we build a coherent, easy to understand,

easy to use, but no loss of control? We wanted to satisfy the ultimate power users as well. So a very tough line to walk between easy to understand, easy to use, but infinitely capable and powerful. And so we identified a baseline operating system that we could build on top of and that was OpenWRT. We just selected OpenWRT because one, it's open source and everything that we do must be open source. And two, it is the ultimate power. OpenWRT can do anything.

Anything at all that you could think about doing with networks, it can do. Right? And it has, like, really clear ways of doing it. It's an old project that is very tried and true and works great. The problem with OpenWRT is that nobody can use it. It is so powerful and built for engineers that is essentially inaccessible to anyone who's not a network engineer with a lot of time to burn. And the stakes are really high too. If you make a mistake with your router, your Internet goes down.

Yeah. It's a fucking mess. Yeah. It's it's a disaster. It's not like some ancillary device. It's the I've done to the Internet. So you you can't mess it up. And so nobody uses OpenWrt because it's too too much power, too much risk. But we saw it as a huge opportunity because we're like, okay. We could do anything with this. All we need to do is build some really easy to understand abstractions

on top of OpenWRT and a new user interface, and we'll have ourselves the ultimate router. Easy to use, maximally powerful, beautiful. And so as we started designing this thing, I just got increasingly excited. And I was like, oh my god, we have a hit.

We have a hit product here. Like, this is this is now when somebody asked me what router should I use, I can, like, you know, I bar is very high. My standards are very high. Do not I didn't I don't even say this stuff about start OS, because start OS is it's amazing. Don't get me wrong. But like, it has still has a long way to go. We like we one shot at this fucker. Right? Like, start WRT, which is what we're calling it, is the ultimate router operating system. It's fully open source,

easy to understand, easy to use, maximally powerful. It will run on any piece of hardware that is capable of running OpenWRT today. So if you have a router at home and it is OpenWRT compatible, you can just flash start WRT and take your whole control of your networking to the next level. I can do that right now. It's stable enough to do that right now or No.

Well, it it is, but we haven't released the binaries yet. Okay. Fair enough. The code is literally closed source right now. We haven't even, like, opened the repo because we haven't shipped it yet. It will be. And all the extensions that we did to open w r t are MIT. So open w r t itself is not MIT, but our wrapper around it is. So it's open source. But, you know

okay. So soon. Very soon, Matt. I promise. We then took it further and wanted to extend the concept of open sources as far as we could. So we are the first risk five based wireless router on the market. So RISC five, for those who don't know, is an alternative instruction set to the two dominant instruction sets that all computers run on today, which is x eighty six sixty four, also known as AMD 64, and ARM, also known as ARCH 64.

These are the two, you know, baseline low level instruction sets that pretty much all computers, cell phones, other electronic devices run on. RISC five is a rapidly emerging new instruction set that is based on an open standard. This allows us, us being humanity, to develop chips, microprocessors

that are open source, whose schematics are published on the Internet, and then go further and do boards as well. So, you know, motherboards whose schematics are published on the Internet, all running open firmware.

So in theory, risk five is, at present, I think, our only real hope for a fully open source hardware future where our phones, our laptops, and all the computing devices in our lives are fully open source and therefore can be fully trusted, especially with AI systems now being thrown at the code bases to discover vulnerabilities, malware, or bugs.

So we are pioneering risk five. We are all in on risk five. If we're wrong, we're dead. Okay? So put your investor hat back on, and I you know, we're we're making a huge bet on risk five as a technology, and on the fact that people will care.

And if we're right, we're gonna be the risk five company. Right? Someone's like, oh, I heard about this risk five thing. It's open it's open source all the way through hardware so Intel doesn't have a backdoor into my computer. Where do I get a risk five laptop? Where do I get a risk five server? Where do I get a risk five router, etcetera. I want them to think of Start Nine. Awesome. We're gonna pioneer this and be a household name in the risk five industry.

And so the router is our first risk five device, open hardware, open firmware, open software, all except the WiFi module. WiFi modules cannot be had open source. It is there does not exist. And so that is the one piece of the entire hardware software stack

that is not open source. There's also, like, one blob in the boot in the bootloader that is currently closed as well that we are working to extricate and put in with an open source piece but again, negligible compared to the amount of closed this that most computers have. It's like tiny. So anyway, fully open source, maximally powerful, easy to understand, easy to use. Best router in the world. I think we have the best router in the world. So it's now on presale. What router.start9.com.

Please contribute to the project. Router.start9.com. I'll put that in the show notes. It is a Bitcoin only BTC pay self hosted BTC pay crowdfund. That's fun. 54 contributors $14,000 raised. Yep. Which is nothing. We've we have not advertised this at all. When when? The router will ship this summer. It'll be inboxes on the way to you this summer. It's done. It's done. We're just putting together the operational, you know, polishes and and sourcing

the, you know, the Wi Fi cards and stuff like that. There's actually a problem in the world right now. There's a problem in the world right now. I don't know if you're aware that the FCC sort of, you know, effectively banned Wi Fi routers in The United States. Well, because, like, they have to be made here. Right? And none of them are made here. None of them are made here. So the FCC said that they will no longer issue certifications, which you need. Right? Because radio waves.

Correct. So they control the air. This is not freezing. Right? This is proprietary stuff right here, this air. And so you need their approval to use that air, and they will not give you that approval unless your Wi Fi router is manufactured, is the language, in The USA. Problem with manufactured in The USA is that it doesn't have a definition. It's extremely vague intentionally

so that they can do selective enforcement when they feel like it and let it go when they feel like it. This benefits friends and hurts enemies. So manufacturing in The USA, we don't know what it means. We assemble these in The USA. Seems like manufacturing to me, I'm not quite sure. We can't get a lawyer to give us a straight answer because they're all terrified of being wrong.

And the lawyers whose job it is is to interpret the law, refuse to interpret a law that doesn't already have an interpretation. This is just called a loop. Everyone avoids responsibility, so we have to make some judgment calls here about how we are going to actually do this because the device as a whole does not have an FCC certification. The Wi Fi module that we're using is FCC certified. The board is FCC certified.

But the second you put the WiFi module into the FCC WiFi module into the FCC certified board, the whole new thing is not now FCC certified and needs to be. And so there's a very good chance, very good chance, depending on what kind of legal advice we can conjure up here, that Start Nine will not be selling WiFi routers this summer, and that instead we will be selling wired routers with no WiFi card in them, and we will be selling WiFi cards.

That you install into the wired router. I it's not exactly what you do with it. We sell The user is making a decision. Got it. We sell routers that are not Wi Fi, therefore, do not need the certification. You can still use Ethernet. Routers without WiFi are a very viable product. Right? Like, we're selling a wired router. No WiFi. We also sell WiFi cards. And so if you buy both and put them together, I I can't stop you.

And that that unfortunately is how we may have to proceed in this environment. Sort of like your website getting censored and telling everyone it's there on tour, you know, we think this gives us an opportunity to look cool.

Fair enough. Right? Like, we're gonna do what we gotta do, but I'm not I'm gonna turn lemons into lemonade as best I can here and be like, alright, look, you know, I'll sell Wi Fi router, so I guess you have to buy a wired one and a Wi Fi card and you know what I mean? Like, these fucking idiots, man. It's such a so stupid. It's fucking insane. Well, I appreciate I appreciate all the work you guys have been doing. You've been fighting the good fight. And I know it's not easy. So thank you.

Thank you for supporting us. Most don't. I don't know if you're aware of the early fundraising efforts. It's so degrading. I hate I hate the roadshow. I hate the pitch because It's fucking worse. I know what I'm doing is important. I think what I'm doing can make you a boatload of money. I understand it's not traditional SaaS with a home run. I understand it's not some pie in the sky narrative that you can sell to the next round and eventually dump on the public's head in an IPO.

But, no, we got shoved out of a lot of rooms, and it's nice that we, you know, have quite a few actually, mostly from the Bitcoin space, almost entirely from the Bitcoin space. Individuals and a couple small entities that saw what we were doing, saw the opportunity that nobody else wanted to take, and gave us a chance. And it's starting to pay off. We, you know, had a huge 2025. Now that we're expanding into the router market,

we are this is a whole new ballgame. Right? This is not the personal server market, which is a few crazy people on the side of the world. We're gonna expand, by the way. Router market, everyone's got routers, and we have the best router in the world. So I think it's a huge, huge business opportunity here. And then, like I said before, we get to start having a lot of fun. So I'll tease it. It's not this summer, but we now have a working assembled, fully functional prototype

of a risk five based, fully open source security camera that is connecting through a fully functional running start WRT start nine router to a start OS server with video software installed, such that this person who has this prototype set up can, at this moment, go anywhere in the world and watch live security footage of their home in such a way that nobody on Earth, except now everyone on Earth because I'm saying it on this call, knows that the camera exists.

Alright. There is zero zero third party involvement, zero third party cloud storage, no custodianship, no intermediation, fully open source, fully self contained security systems. So Start Nine is in in effect about to burst into the home automation, home security ecosystem and market with an unprecedented product. Right? Security systems that are 100% self contained and under the control of the of the owner with zero subscriptions

forever. It's an upfront capital cost, a few minutes of setup, and you have a badass home security system that is backed by the server, processed through the router, and expressed in the form of IoT devices, the first of which will be a security camera, but we have others in the pipeline as well. That's freaking awesome. I need that. I do too. That's why we're building it actually. It's I literally

personally need it. Yep. Everyone else can benefit great, but I'm I'm building this for me. I mean, that's why ten thirty one exists. Sir, this is always a pleasure. It's fucking awesome. Great chat. I know we went over time. I appreciate you. As we do and should. Yeah. All good. I, do you have any final thoughts for the audience before we wrap? I love it. Well, thanks again for joining guys. Router.start9.com. Also, just start9.com. If you wanna get a server, highly recommend.

I'll put all relevant links in the show notes. Got a great conversation lined up for next week. We're just gonna keep gonna keep grinding, keep rolling. Give me your feedback. If you have any all relevant links, still dispatch.com. Love you all stay humble stack sides. Peace.