Viktor Lidholt, Serverpod - Streamlining Full-Stack Dart for Faster Engineering Teams

Speaker A: Hi, welcome to Build to Succeed from Very Good Ventures. Today we meet with Victor Litholt, founder of ServerPod, an open source scalable app server written in Dart for the Flutter community. In this episode, Victor shares how his game industry roots and experience on the Flutter team at Google led him to start building a backend framework optimized for Dart and specifically Flutter. He explores product leadership ecosystem M insights and how his team is shaping the next wave of developer tooling. I hope you enjoy this episode. Okay. Welcome Victor.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Great to have you. Um, let's start our conversation today with something fun. What's something that uh, you do outside of work that energizes you or influences you, uh, in what you do every day at work?

Speaker B: Yeah, so I do a lot of CrossFit, so I usually take a break at uh, like 11 is my class, head down to the gym. I have like the best of setups. There's a gym in the basement of the building where we have our server pod office. So I just go, that takes me a minute. Do my class, eat lunch and then I'm like energized to for the rest of the day.

Speaker A: Amazing.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So the question is, how many uh, how many pull ups can you do? And do you kip or no kip?

Speaker B: If I do kipping, I've done 130.

Speaker A: Whoa, that's a lot of pull ups.

Speaker B: Yeah. Not in a row. Not in a row. Like during an hour.

Speaker A: No. That's impressive. Um, that's uh, CrossFit's, uh, no joke. So good on you to bring that in. Do you feel like um, that helps to focus you?

Speaker B: I think it definitely sort of centers me and gives me having that little break in the day. I think it's really helpful you get a bit of a perspective on whatever you're working on. And it's running a startup, I'm sure, you know, or I mean company can be pretty stressful at times just having that break where you, when you like lifting weights and jumping and doing burpees, there's like no way to think about work. Right. So you get like complete break from that. So I really think that's good, uh, thing. It's like not uh, just the exercise, but it's a bit of a mindfulness thing for me. Right.

Speaker A: I uh, I mean I did CrossFit a long time ago. Way out of it at this point. But um, in terms of uh, an exercising, like an activity you can do, I feel like it's actually a good simulation to some extent of building a startup team. Because when you do it you're with a group, like everyone's together, you're all supporting it, but you're still kind of like testing yourself, you know, because there's a lot of things that you're doing alone. And so it's interesting. I've always thought it was an interesting one where it's really focused on you specifically, but in the context of the broader group and everyone's trying to like encourage each other to get their own personal best and stuff, you know, kind of cool. So, um, I also know you've been traveling a lot recently. Obviously I saw you in, in Berlin this year for ah, for Flutter Con. Um, and I know you, you travel the world somewhat for uh, for various Flutter community events. Have you been to anywhere interesting recently?

Speaker B: Yeah, I got home this morning if I look a little bit tired because I slept on airplane. But I, I spent uh, the past five days in Nigeria, Legos visiting the Flutterbytes conference there, which was awesome. I uh, think it's a great community, was, I think 600 people at the conference. So Africa's biggest flat conference and yeah, great vibe uh, for the conference and um, yeah, I think probably among the friendliest people I've hanged out with at the conference. So that was really awesome.

Speaker A: That's wonderful. 600, that's a big crowd for uh, for what we're doing here in the Flutter ecosystem. So you know, you got Fluttercon eu the US version. There's you know, Flutterbytes. I know you've got Flutter and friends. I think Fluttercon is doing one in India this year. I know we've got, there's like, there's uh, some Flutter conferences in Japan these days. Have you been kind of hitting as many of these as you can or what's your strategy for attending these events?

Speaker B: Yeah, kind of all of them. Uh, there was also um, a couple of weeks ago in Spain, Malaga. It was a little bit of a smaller event. I think it was like 220 people or so. But still, uh, it was a great event also nice place to visit especially you know, if you're sweet. This time of year gets really gloomy here, so getting away, getting a bit of sun. Uh, yeah, it's always a good energy boost going to the conferences I think, and get a feel for like how excited everyone are about uh. Yeah, the whole Flutter community and Flutter and building stuff.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's just been great over the last couple of years, you know, post Covid to see the resurgence of all these events and stuff because obviously for A while there, all the meetups, all the conferences, everything was shut down or virtual. And I think you're like seeing the people in real life and seeing the enthusiasm and making those personal connections is absolutely critical.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so too. I mean it's a great way for us to um, get more people to see, you know, what are we doing with ServerPod, but also, you know, building your network and yeah, that's something I have a very strong delivery in, uh, basically connecting people. Even if you. I always try to help out. Even if there's not like a good fit with say, ServerPod or what we do, they can often be like, if you can find two people, you can connect. That's always a win.

Speaker A: I totally agree. Like, I sometimes think about like, what would I like to do in the future if uh, retired or something like that. And I think it's, you know, there's a lot of like, enthusiasm and excitement over like just if you connect two people and then you find out a year later that something amazing happened because you like, made that connection. I love those stories. But before we like, I want to get into the community stuff because I know it's been a really important part of your efforts and your strategy to grow Server Pod. But let's maybe take a step back and can you kind of give us your story from beginning to where you are now, culminating maybe in what is Server Pod and why, why does it matter to the tech community?

Speaker B: Right. It's a long story, but, uh, let's do the shorter version of it. But I started, you know, uh, programming when I was probably 12. Learned programming on, uh, uh, Macintosh Plus. It was almost the original Macintosh, you know, the black and white two color computer. And I mean when I was a kid, grew up, I wanted to do computer games. Uh, and then I worked in the game industry for many years. I was lead developer for one of Sweden's biggest game companies. And there I built a tool for building mobile games. And it got picked up by CNGA and another couple of the world's largest game companies. So CNGA bought it from me and we made it open source and I moved to San Francisco to work for them. So that was an exciting time. Then I got an offer from a startup in, um, San Francisco because all the clients used my tools to build the games. So they gave me a team of like 10 developers and I worked there for two years and it was uh, it was a fun time. They used my tools to teach game development at mit, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon. I got to go to all those places give lectures and, you know, traveled conferences all over. Unfortunately they ran out of money, as startups sometimes do. And then they sold me to Google, where I ended up on the Flutter team. So I worked at the Flutter team for, it was about a year, uh, that was very early on, before the first, like the release of the first version or Public 1.0. It was up on GitHub, all of the code, but not anyone, I don't think anyone was using it at the time. So I moved back to Stockholm, had another startup, built a news app, and while building that, obviously I used Flutter, but I really missed having a good backend for it. So when that failed, I wanted to give startups a second chance, do everything right this time. And something I had really been missing was having a good backend in Dart. So that's really where the idea for serverpub was born.

Speaker A: So you got exposed to Flutter and Dart as a result of that sort of Aqua, uh, hire into Google. You got placed on the Flutter team. Did you have any like agency in that decision to be placed on the Flutter team, or did Google just put you there? And it ends up being a serendipitous thing, you know.

Speaker B: So, um, the startup I worked for, they tried to sell the whole company. We were like maybe 100 people, 80 developers or something like that. So they shopped us around at like Google, Twitter, Dropbox, we did like interviews at all these places and then they didn't manage to sell the whole company, but Google bought like the top eight developers and then I sold a bunch of other developers to um, gaming company. It's crazy that it works like that in Silicon Valley, but. Right, right, it was the reality of it. But um, I was in the US for a work visa, so an H1B and um, if you don't have a job, basically you have a week to pack your bag and leave the country. So I got like more or less an ultimatum, like you sign for Google tomorrow or you have a new job tomorrow. So it was like an easy choice. Also not a bad place to end up, right?

Speaker A: Sure, yeah, yeah. But it's cool that you found Flutter and Google like Flutter and Dart through this way and then here you are building backends with Dart.

Speaker B: Yeah, I feel it was a pretty good match for me because my background in doing a lot of, you know, low level computer graphics and uh, game engines and all that stuff, uh, so I had pretty good understanding, I would say, uh, about mobile and I thought Flutter was really a project that was exciting to me. To work on, but I felt like I was only a year at Google.

Speaker A: Well, it's cool. Uh, I mean, I think a lot of people probably don't know this about you, that you were, um, so early on the Flutter team and then that's where the. Because I mean, obviously we see you in the community for Server Pod and we know you've been around, but it's been a long time now.

Speaker B: Right. And so it's cool to sort of

Speaker A: get that context, like your, your enthusia and that connection to gaming is really cool because I've heard people say Flutter's kind of like a, like a 2D gaming engine for user interfaces, you know, so that's cool to see that story arc, connecting all the dots to get to where you are today.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's, uh, I, I had a great experience at Google. So, uh, it's. It was a very cool company and very cool to see from the inside. Right. I didn't realize before I joined how many things they do and how many cool things they do. You see like the search engine now, I guess you see the AI, but they're like loads of projects and products that, you know, may be released in five or maybe even 10 years. It's not so many companies that can build products on that sort of timescale, like really big things.

Speaker A: Yeah, it is, it is impressive. Obviously Google is so massive and they do so many things and it's very easy to, um, find fault with a lot of their decisions and how they do things, because everything they do, good or bad, is at a big scale. Right. But I think you're right that they're making investments in bets. Even the AI stuff, I think is largely right. The transforming pattern is because of Google researchers figured that out and, you know, and all the tensor work they were doing over the years and all those sorts of things. Although one time I had a, uh, I went to a Firebase summit and an engineer was like, yeah, all this like, machine learning stuff exists so that like YouTube could figure out how to serve videos of cats to people that, like watching videos of cats, you know, more effectively. And it's like, oh, that's where all this AI stuff came from is. Is YouTube like, uh, you know, recommended videos? Pretty much. But it's kind of fascinating. So you mentioned that you were missing this like, backend for Dart and when you were building your first startup and building an app and all that, what was the insight or sequence of, of steps that got you to feel like, you know what, this is a piece that's really missing from this ecosystem and I'm going to solve it.

Speaker B: Right. I started writing our backend in Python because uh, we used a lot of um, it was before Generative AI was a thing, but there is still a lot of text analysis tools available in Python that was definitely the easiest to use and set up and work the best. So I used them and then I figured like, yeah, I'll just do everything in Python. And you know, I hated it so much, one day I just uh, ripped out the like the core methods or features I needed in Python, made it into like a tiny little server and then I rewrote everything in Dart, but it wasn't like a framework, it was just like a RAW server. So um, that's quite a lot of more work to build your APIs that way. So that made me think someone should really do this. And so we have a great backend solution a little bit like, you know what Flutter is to Dart on the front end, something like Server is for Dart on the backend and felt like it was really was a missing piece in the ecosystem. I mean there was Dart Shelf, but it didn't feel sufficient. Right. At least for what I needed.

Speaker A: Yeah. And a lot of people in the Flutter community would default to like Firebase and things like that, but they never really built you know, a Dart first party Dart SDK for Firebase, which I, I think a lot of people always were like clamoring for that and saying hey, if you did this we could just be writing Dart on both sides. So I think that kind of missed opportunity creates opportunity for, for others to come in and, and innovate.

Speaker B: Yeah. And ah, yeah, I m mean I started looking at Firebase when I, when I built our app there but the things we were doing, you know, had to do a lot of server side stuff, scraping websites and then um, also uh, the Firestore document database structure wasn't really a great match for what we were building. So it wasn't really a uh, solution. I'm sure Firebase works great for some type of apps, but it's not like a, sort of fits everything.

Speaker A: So with Server Pod, obviously one of the advantages is that you can write full stack Dart, you can write Dart for Flutter, your front end code with Flutter and you can write Dart for your Server Pod, uh code in the back end and that allows for some code reuse and sharing across that stack, which would be awesome. What are the sort of the architectural or product features of Server Pod that are differentiated or specific to Server Pod that maybe People don't know about or would want to learn about.

Speaker B: Yeah. So we put a lot of time and effort and thinking into making ServerPod like a really smooth experience to work with. So uh, something that we built in serverpod that is kind of unique is that uh, you just add your methods to the server, we'll analyze your server code and replicate the same methods in your client and then we generate the whole API in between. So uh, you don't really have to worry about the API under the hood. It's like a well formed REST API, so there's no real magic. It just feels like magic. Right. So it's a much more seamless experience. You uh, have to add methods on the server and you call them from your front end and it just works. So that is a pretty sweet experience. And also you need to put your methods in an endpoint method be solved a lot of issues that are other otherwise can be hard with things like Firebase, uh, where when you have to version your API, say for mobile apps, you can have old clients uh, that need to be able to connect to your server in Server Pod. Now you can just inherit or from an endpoint to create a new sort of a copy of that endpoint and add new stuff to it and you still have the old one there. So that's a pretty cool feature that we've added I think for that people may not know of. It's pretty new so we're going to push it more into like the next version of ServerBot. But it's really a sort of a super feature because uh, it just you know, save you a ton of work. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. That's awesome. Is it um, in terms of like integrating with databases or other third party systems, do you just have like full flexibility in that regard or what are sort of the, what's the scope of what Server Pod can do for.

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean you have full flexibility in terms you can use any Dart packages to connect to external services or you can just, you know, have the rest APIs. Nowadays if there's something missing in Dart, it's pretty easy to generate it for Dart with Generative AI. But uh, we do have really, really great support for Postgres. Uh, so we built a complete orm. Uh, we, we did all the hard parts, you know, database migrations, that works great. We have Support for relations. Jo Many ORMs are you start making the easy parts where you can basically take a row and convert it to an object and then you get to the harder parts, you know, building queries that are type safe and stuff like that. And maybe you fail, but we spent a year figuring out how to do it, uh, do it right. So that's really, uh, actually really cool. Features that Officer Pawn as well. That's awesome. You get like all the autocomplete in your editor and all that stuff since it's all type safe, which is really nice.

Speaker A: Nice. And can you um, tell me a little bit about the deployment and how um, Server Pod, if I'm a new customer to you and I'm evaluating this, is this a thing that you guys run and I have to contract with your infrastructure and run everything with you, or is it portable to different cloud providers? Or how does it work in that EcoSystem?

Speaker B: Yeah, so ServerPod is all open source, so you can run it anywhere you want. You can run it on Google Cloud. It's pretty easy to set up on uh, uh, is it called cloud run, for instance? Ah, you can run on aws, so you can run it, you know, on your computer in your basement if you want that. Or you can run it on serverpot Cloud. And then it's uh, even easier. It's really easier configuration. So you have your server port, just type scloud deploy and we set up a full infrastructure with load balancers, database domain names, all that stuff. So it's uh, a little bit like a magic turnkey for deployments of your, uh, Server Pod. And so we will be able to support, you know, any Dart servers as well. It's really no difference. It's um, just we started making it really good for Server Pod and we'll go from there. But yeah, that's something we've been working on for the past two years. And um, it's uh, it's in a private beta now, but if you join our discord, we can hook you up if you want to try it out. Basically right on.

Speaker A: I like how you positioned it as like Flutter is the framework for Dart on the front end and Server Pod is the framework for Dart on the back end. Would you compare it? I mean, I'm trying to make sure that anyone who might be listening to this can like kind of wrap it where they. How to think about what ServerPod is. Would you compare it to like a Node JS or like a Ruby on Rails type thing or what do you think would be like the closest comparison to some other ecosystem? Uh, or is it totally different, you think?

Speaker B: Yeah, no, it's uh, it's probably pretty similar to Node JS in a. In that sense that you have Node JS and then you have React, but um, no one has really done it for Dot. I know you have Dot, Frog, obviously, but it's a little bit, uh, the scope is smaller which is great for some projects. I think it's sort of a different fit for different projects. What you want to go with there, if you're doing something small, if you're doing a bigger app with like for instance, uh, a really killer feature that we have in Server Pod is uh, streaming. So in your server you can just make a method that returns a stream and then you can listen to that stream from your Flutter app. And that works. You know, you can have 100 streams in your Flutter app that connects to your server, pipe it through a single web socket and routes all the messages to the right methods on the server, keeps track of the life cycle of the um, connection, uh, on the client. All those things that are otherwise quite a lot of work to set up and get right. And there are a lot of small little things that you sort of pitfall so you can fall into and yeah, not get it right if you write it. So uh, we really did all the hard parts there so our users can just do the fun things.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. I think it's wonderful that we have options all the way from Shelf. Things like Dart Frog and Server Pod. There are different levels of complexity and kind of work that's done to make it more um, effective for a developer to pick where they want to go right. In that ecosystem. I know you're working on something new too, right, that you've uh, codenamed Relic, right. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe some of the upcoming things you guys are working on within Server Pod, uh, what we could look forward to?

Speaker B: Yeah, we have a lot of things coming up. Ah so Relic is probably one that will be, that is closest to be done. It's going to be released in the 1.0 version probably in the next few weeks. We're basically finalizing the documentation and making that really nice. That's something that's been lacking a little bit for Shelf. Hasn't been super great documentation and hard to find good examples. So we're putting together both, uh, a suit of examples, but also really good documentation as we see it. We started with Shelf and then we have just fixed everything that we thought were a little bit awkward or not that creating Shelf. Shelf was written quite a long time ago when Dart looked uh, different. So Shelf has some great support for type safety. There are lots of dynamic types that you pass into methods which is not like good practice anymore for efficiency and for all sorts of reasons. You want to keep things as typed as possible. Right. We also added. So you have, when you pass HTTP headers, they're all typed now. So instead of passing a string with a date that you need to know how to format, you'll pass the datetime or the same with cookies or any of these other things. And they just, you know, works. Uh, and you can add your own extension methods if you have custom headers, even. Um, and then we, uh, yeah, we looked at the inside. There's like a ton of updates, many smaller ones. And then we made the interface look very similar to Shelf, so you can use that. But we also added a bunch of shorthands that makes it easier to work with.

Speaker A: That's amazing.

Speaker B: So there's an exciting release coming up. And uh, we're also working on serverbot 3 that is close to being done. We have migrated serverpot 3 to work on top of Relic. So we're sort of. That's the reason we really rewrote Shelf. We felt like it didn't really fit the bill for what we wanted to do with serverpot. So, uh, we made sure to make it really, really good. And then we're building ServerPod on top of that. And that gives ServerPod things like middleware support also. So it's gives and a really good web server.

Speaker A: That's wonderful. I think it's also a great example of the power of open source software communities because you were using Shelf, which helped you to get started. You learned a lot along the way building Server pod, started thinking, oh, how can we make this better? And then realized like, well, actually we can just make a lot of improvements, but then also, you know, give that to the community as part of what you're doing. So thank you for, for doing that, tackling those problems and helping, you know, Dart and the uh, overall community of people building with these tools, um, giving them more options and more opportunities.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: I wanted to ask you a little bit about how you guys have been growing too, right? So your customer base over the years as Server Pod has grown, the Flutter Dart community has grown. How has your customer base changed over the years? And are you um, Or I guess what is it showing you about the Flutter community in terms of the customers you're starting to see use Server Pod?

Speaker B: Yeah, so unfortunately with ServerPoint we can't really measure super well on the DT. We don't really track our users in that respect. I mean we can see how many downloads or when Someone is using the CLI tool. So we can see that there's like thousands of apps being built, but we don't know what these apps are or anything like that. But obviously we know the people we speak with. And that's something that's been really cool at these conferences because it's like for every conference we've been to there like a larger share of people we meet there that are using ServerPod for the projects and uh, some pretty big ones too. And a lot of app agencies have, that they're building with Flutter have started using ServerPod because it has, it gives them. Basically they can build the products faster is probably the main point. But they can also quite easily reuse code between projects, which is huge for some app agents if they build similar typed apps. So that is, I, uh, think we've seen over the past year. Like a year ago it was more, you know, hobby developers we met that use ServerPod. Now it's more app agencies or pretty serious funded startups. So that's definitely a change that is very exciting to see for us.

Speaker A: Uh, obviously you can't track all the implementations of it since it is open source, but I think you have an interesting pulse on the sort of growth of the Dart ecosystem from a different angle, I think from other companies in the ecosystem that might be providing a service to a Flutter app, uh, that's already been built or chosen. You know, the server decision is a very different decision. And uh, and I think that's pretty cool. And I know you've also said like, one of your goals is to get people into Dart and Flutter as a result of Server Pod, not the other way around. Right? Um, yeah.

Speaker B: Now people choose us because they use Flutter, but you know, in the future people will choose Flutter because they love a Server Pod.

Speaker A: I love that. If you were to um, talk to somebody who's uh, you know, considering how, how could I build my, my server side logic for my app. What is like, um, the most powerful or maybe like underrated technical advantage of Server Pod that you think a CTO or somebody sitting down might not know about or should really deeply consider as to like, why to go after Server Pod as opposed to all the other options that are out there?

Speaker B: Well, I would say there are many reasons, but, uh, a few that comes to mind that I've gotten as feedback from uh, some of our users is that they sometimes you do things in your Flutter app that you realize should really be on the server side. It can be like different form of validations of data and stuff. Like that and uh, if you have like a separate team that writes in a different language and they need to replicate those, that usually may not happen. But if you use Flatware Server port, you can just copy, paste that code and paste it, you know, in the right spot or share it between the app and the server. So that's a pretty cool thing, uh, having everything in the same language. Also when you're hiring, it's so much easier for Flutter developer if they need to do some small change on the back end. If it's using the same language, the same project, everything else fits together like one unit, it's much, much easier for them to go to fix that little thing that they need themselves rather than talking to a backend engineer or even maybe you know, project manager in between. So that's uh, also something for efficiency and how you can as a company recruit people that know Flutter and Dart. It's much easier than finding Full Stack developers that know say Go and Flutter or you know, JavaScript and Flutter or like the perfect combination of the two. So for startups or app agencies that's uh, huge advantage also when it comes to recruit, recruiting and time to build stuff.

Speaker A: And it's also been something, I think the JavaScript community has kind of like held over the heads of the Dart and Flutter community of like. Well it's Full Stack, we've got, you know, Node JS and JavaScript TypeScript on the back end. You've got React, you've got React Native and for a lot of years React and React Native was just kind of like clever branding. Like they actually weren't that you couldn't. Just because you built something in React, it didn't mean you could just put it on the, on mobile with React Native and vice versa. I know there's been some work to try to help with that, but like Dart in the early days didn't really have that Full Stack story. So now, now thanks to you and uh, you know, the efforts of Shelf and Dart Frog and all these other things, we have more Full Stack options. Um, and I think that Dart is, especially if you're a TypeScript JavaScript developer like Dart is, is relatively straightforward language to pick up in terms of its similarness. So I think it's just wonderful for us to have these options and to be able to make these choices and to have teams like yours really, uh, putting a lot of time and energy to not just make a product that does the thing, but also to invest in the infrastructure like you're doing with Relic to make it all better. Um, so it's great to see. So you're building these tools, this developer tooling and we're talking about all the benefits of Server Pod. But I also want to crack into like your startup founder kind of point of view because you've done that several times. You've also worked at big companies like Google, um, you had a startup that didn't go well and out of that came Server Pod, right. Like you. But it's all the trajectory and the learnings. What practices or sort of insights have you picked up over the years through that journey that has enabled your smaller small team now to like move fast and build something really ambitious? Because this is not an easy problem you're solving, it's technically difficult. What has helped you to move quickly and figure out what to build?

Speaker B: I think um, there are a couple of things that I learned from my previous experiences. One is um, be very uh, careful with and spend a lot of time on recruitment, making sure the people we hire are really skilled. I don't really, it doesn't really matter too much if they know start. I think that's something you can pick up if you're a good developer. But this can be different for different types of projects. But for something like serverpod, it's so complex. It's um, like really the nitty gritty details or generating code, analyzing the dart side of things, building trees of um, parsed data. And there's a lot of pretty complex stuff in there. So um, really need like good developers. So spending that extra time finding good talent I think super important. But another learning is that you know, if you have a startup, maybe this is true for many companies. You never know, you know the outcome. It's very insecure in a way. Right? We raised money so we're good for, for a pretty good while, but you never know. And um, we're doing everything we can for it to work out obviously and putting all that effort in, but there's a chance it won't work out. So I figure like the important thing is like we should have fun doing this then you know, if it were to fail, we kind of won anyway, right? Because we had like a couple of great years building this. If you just think about like getting that next release out or whatever it is, I think there's also a, ah, bigger risk of failure. If you have fun and build um, a team together you like working with, the chances for success is much, much greater too.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's fantastic advice, right? As founders or uh, especially founders, you're in this interesting spot where you kind of have this big bold goal, it's very high risk. And a lot of times you don't even have necessary full control over whether or not you're going to be successful because you can make an amazing product that fits the market well. But maybe right when you launch, there's like a big economic downturn or something, right? Like, there's so many external factors that it can be, it's a tough position. And um, you know, one thing that I think is interesting as a founder, especially in the very early days, let's say the first three to five years, maybe if you raise a series C or D or whatever, it's a different story. But like, quitting is not an option. You can't just be like, oh, I don't like this job, I'm going to go, like, just change jobs. You can't really do that. And I think that kind of creates like a pressure, tension to like really make sure that what you're doing is motivating to you, is passionate to you. And like, like you're saying, and out of. I, I, I personally have felt like when, when people are bringing passion to something, the outputs are so much better. Like the carrot stick model of like incentives in, in companies and business. I think they don't nearly create the result of when people are just genuinely interested and passionate about what they're trying to accomplish. You know, So I think that insight of like making sure you're having fun and enjoying it, you know, I love that idea too, that at the end, if, if, even if for whatever number of myriad reasons that you can't control it doesn't work out, as long as you can look back on that time and be like, we had fun and we learned something and we did something cool together, you've already won.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think so. That's, and for me, I think I kind of need to work in a startup. Being in a big company or it's fine for a little bit, but I, I have too much, you know, creativity ideas that I need to get out somehow.

Speaker A: Um, yeah, well, I mean, it's great. The world has both, right? I think if, if all big companies were run by startup, um, founders all the time and that's what everybody was, it would be complete chaos. Uh, and so, you know, you need the Googles of the world like we were describing before, just in terms of the sheer scale and the, the time horizons and the investments they can make at such a massive scale. Um, but then you need small creative, you know, really Passionate people who are working to really change very important problems in different ways. So, um, need more people like you out there, for sure. Um, so you are very active and have been, um, in the Flutter community space for a very long time. Um, I think it's a, you know, obvious benefit to you to immerse yourself in those communities to attract people to it. Um, what are some other advantages of kind of showing up at all these events and being such an active contributor to the community? Creating open source, writing content and contributing and just being like a known person and company within that ecosystem? What are some of the advantages you've had, maybe beyond the obvious of like, the opportunity to maybe meet a customer?

Speaker B: The feeling of being a rock star. Yeah, but. No, I'm kidding. But, um, yeah, so my, like, yes, I had my 15 minutes of fame at one conference. Like, the crowd was chanting my name when I entered the stage.

Speaker A: Awesome. Love that. Yeah.

Speaker B: Otherwise, I, I mean, I, to be fair, I mostly do to build our brand and raise awareness. But also, you know, I think what I get back the most is probably all the connections I get. Especially, you know, when, uh, when I go to conferences and meet people in person and they, you know, they know me and I get a chance to meet all these people that I think that's the biggest thing, maybe on a personal level.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's important to highlight, though, because I think one of the things that I've been trying to help the community of, like, especially the enterprise, you know, user base within the Flutter community, saying, hey, we need you here. Um, we need you at the Flutter events. We need you. The, these bigger companies that have large teams of maybe 100 engineers or more, we need them there. And there's a little bit of a question of, like, why, you know, what benefit does a company get out of kind of showing up at this event? You know, the obvious ones are like, well, maybe I can get more customers by making the people more aware that we exist. Or the second thing might be maybe I can hire or recruit people. But what you just highlighted, I think is really important that I think, um, if you're looking very tactically on, like, how many leads did I get? And then how many leads did I convert? And that's how you're judging the value of attendance at an event. You're missing a bigger picture, which is that maybe in the course of that event you encountered a hundred people that had a personal interaction with you, that you created, uh, a connection, that relationship. It might be that the benefit isn't within Six months of the event, you've signed a new customer. It might be that six years later that contact has developed into a friend or, uh, a network professionally that can unlock something or could make a connection like you were describing for of m. Like, oh, you know, who you should talk to is Victor, you know, and then all of a sudden, boom, like years later. And that's really hard to quantify. But I think what you just hit on there is super important. That gets lost a lot of times.

Speaker B: Yeah, I think we touched a little bit on that in the beginning here also. Just, you know, helping people out that you meet along the way, it may not have like an immediate effect, but I think, like, in the longer term it definitely will have because maybe, you know, maybe just help someone or connect two people that can help each other out. But, you know, that will. All that will come back if you do it enough times to you, uh, in many good forms. So, um, I think that's also a great way to look at it. If you go to a, uh, networking event and just focus on the persons, you know, that, you know, this could be a potential sale or this can be like, I want to talk with this person. Because of this, I, uh, think you kind of miss out. So it's good to like, not ignore the persons that may not look interesting and if you can give them a helping hand along the way, that can maybe help them now, but help you or help someone they've helped in the future, help you, who knows.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that's good advice, not just for tech communities, but for all communities. Um, in terms of communities and where you see Flutter going, is there, do you, do you see any needs within the Flutter community or sort of things that, if we had this or could, uh, approach certain things with better within the Flutter community, it would improve. And Dart. Let's be more broad about Dart. What things would really help these Dart communities grow and thrive more in the years ahead, you think?

Speaker B: I think it's really cool that, uh, the Flutter team is breaking out material on Cupertino from the sort of core of Flutter. I think that opens up doors for the future for the communities to step up and build high, uh, quality packages for different, uh, types of UIs. So that is definitely something. I think the community can step up and do a better job there already. I mean, some amazing stuff out there. Like we're using ShedCM, uh, for uh, Certboard Cloud, our console, for instance. And that works pretty good. Uh, but, uh, I would love something. I kind of started a little Bit is doing uh, native um, liquid ah, Glass implementation with uh, or is it called uh, platform use, uh, actually works pretty well. So you can get like Liquid Glass proper in your Flutter app. Getting that to production level is something that would be super cool if we could do like as a community effort, you can do it pretty easy if you just use platform use, it's not that hard but it would be nice to have a full library so you can just drop it in and have it working. So that's something. And maybe it shouldn't be done with platform use. It's possible if you can do it even more efficient. So you may want to do some research into that. But having that I think would be a super cool thing for the Flutter community and uh, moving a little bit faster on those. So make sure it's up to par with whatever is the latest and greatest on each platform.

Speaker A: That's great. A couple like wrap us up here, uh, with a couple of quick fire kind of questions. One thing I wanted to just um, get your point of view on, given your interesting career arc through games building tools for that community, Google and a couple of startups and building server side Dart tools here with Server Pod. What's one lesson from your career that you've learned that you think 10 years from now will still hold true?

Speaker B: I already touched upon it, but it's like make sure you have fun. Whatever you do is uh, development work should be fun. That is my belief. In a way I always enjoyed it. But uh, maybe this is said and done sometimes.

Speaker A: Yeah, to some extent. Like what's. Otherwise what's the point, you know, like doing it for, you know, you're using your very precious time and some people chase money, some people chase prestige or sense of accomplishment, but at the end of the day you got to enjoy the ride. Victor, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your story and for all the contributions you've made for to the Dart community. Um, I hope that uh, anyone listening takes an interest in Server Pod, checks out what you're doing and can hopefully give it a try and use it within their business because it's definitely um, I think a really important part of the ecosystem and has really helped Dart and Flutter and the overall ecosystem be more robust and able to provide this full stack story for everybody. If people wanted to follow your work, uh, explore ServerPod, pursue careers with you, where could they find out more?

Speaker B: So serverpod.dev is the easiest place to start with ServerPod. Obviously we have also an academy which is like a four to six hour class with video tutorials. You can follow along to learn ServerPod. And um, yeah, you can follow me on LinkedIn or X Victor Litholt if you want to find me.

Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you spending some time with us and sharing your story. And thanks again for everything you've done.

Speaker B: Thank you.

Speaker A: Thank you for joining us on Build to Succeed, a very good ventures podcast. We hope you enjoy exploring the experiences and insights of leaders that have built successful digital products. Please take a moment to leave us a review. And if you want to get our latest episodes, don't forget to subscribe. Thanks again. See you next time.