Networking Without Borders. The Future of Connectivity with ZeroTier | Episode #100

The internet wasn't built for how we work today. And enterprise networking shows it. VPNs, firewalls, and SDWANs were designed for a different era. Clunky, manual, and full of friction. In this episode of Great Things with Great Tech, we meet Adam Laramenco, the creator and founder of Zero Tier, and Andrew God, its recently appointed CEO. (00:23) Zero Tier is rewriting the rules of global networking, one line of code at a time. Born from open- source roots and now powering m, you're the the founder of Zero Tier back in around 2011. Um, give a bit of a background about yourself. uh how you came to be in this crazy world of IT and networking and why you saw a need to create um something different uh in the networking world with zero here. (01:55) Okay. Um so my name is Adam. Uh I um I'm one of those people that started programming when I was like six or seven on a Commodore 64, you know, back in that era. So yes, I have been doing I have been doing this for uh if yo ou would give me your IP address and I would just send it to you and that's it. everything could just talk, everything could communicate. It was one big sort of flat world. Um, and on one hand, you know, as the internet went public, um, that ran into all kinds of problems around security and, um, of course, uh, IPv4 not having enough addresses, uh, you know, putting that in the way still. (03:49) Um, and then we added, um, I'm kind of I'm time compressing quite a bit here. Very much. Then we add at the same time that also drove um something else I'm very interested in is is privacy and autonomy online and that kind of thing. (05:12) So that gets into the open-source roots. When you talk about this starting in 2011, uh the company didn't start in 2011, the project did um or at least the or at least the ancestor the ancestral roots of the project. So yeah, um, one of the things that's driven, I mean there's lots of things that have, but one of the things that's driven the, um, the centra an ancestor of what would become zero tier um where I started playing with the idea of using (06:45) cryptographically addressed network cryptographic addresses for networking. Okay. Um, and a cryptographic address, just for the not super nerdy people in the audience, it's an address where your key is your address. So, uh, you have a you have a key that says who you are and that key is also quote where you are on the network. (07:12) So, um, I had all these ideas. I didn't do a ton with them. I work engineering became my day job, it really became uh visceral to me uh in terms of the pain of how terrible it is. I mean it's just absolute and I mean it's it's better today partly because things like zero tier exist but back then uh and we're talking about 2013 now 2014 just I I watched people inside this age I was working for Noah actually the weather service but um I was you know I watched people trying to set up collaborations uh to collaborate with an academic institution and they wante as probably the most grumpiest man that we had in the company, right? Like, you know, he won't mind me saying that. (09:52) Um, but I would be doing my thing on the infrastructure, the network, all the application layers and whatnot, and then it wouldn't work. And I'd go over to to Simon just behind me. I go, "Simon, is the network broken?" And he's like, "It's not the network. It's not the network." He was so adamant that it wasn't the network. I'm like, "Mate, it's the network. (10:10) Like, e it was kind of fun to play with. And I did some reading about it. (11:14) I I remember reading about um something nobody remembers called Project Jericho out of the United Kingdom. Um where uh they talked about something, this was so ahead of its time, called deperimeterization is what they called it. That's which Yeah. which basically meant um instead of the physical network boundary replacing that with a virtual network boundary back then if you if you said that it people would like hug their s is anything with a network can basically treat the entire planet like one data center. And the way I should be able to do networking is I should be able to take any device anywhere on Earth and connect it to any other device on a common shared network. (13:06) And I should be able to do that instantly without having to worry about it. Yeah. And I kind of set that I I set that as as like a goal and a problem statement and also kind of a mission statement. And that's a huge mission statement and smart switch in a data center, right? So what happens if you take an SDN protocol and instead of doing that you stick it on top of a peer-to-peer network? So that's what zero tier is. Um it's a peer-to-peer network with an enterprise SDN protocol on top of it. (14:44) And when you do that, what that gives you is it gives you a giant virtual smart switch the size of the Earth that you can just connect things to. Love that. So then I started hacking on it a lot and um fast forwarding a bit uh I'm tarting to grow and people were starting to talk about it and people were starting to play with it. (16:15) The first things people did with it were things like uh playing Minecraft and playing video games and remotely accessing their dev box and you know things like this. So I kept working on it. Um and uh I made a website for it. Doesn't look anywhere near as nice as our our current website and uh we have a new one coming. (16:35) Looks much nicer. And uh put it out there. And I also then uh a his is we have a we have a growth curve here. (17:57) uh it already kind of confirmed that it was an exponential growth curve. Uh it's pretty clear that there is a need here. There is pain. There are people that want this done. Uh it's spreading kind of virally, you know, as a as a product. But I kind of understood that we are ahead of our time. Uh what I mean by that is I knew that it would take time to build this up and it would also take time for the market to catch up and be ready for it. (1 , will anyone pay for this thing? Um, and that happened for a while until we uh until this is a longer story, but I'll I'll condense it. (19:40) Uh, raised before that before that, can I just say as well, I think the biggest thing that I'm seeing here is that the product was there. It was ready. You said it was ahead of its time. And the buildup is so important here. But the key part is that you don't give up because you're you can tell and just the way that you're describing the background, the nnection there. I'm getting there. Yeah. So, I'm getting there. (20:53) So uh in uh 2019 to 2020 uh raised the first institutional seed money which was from a couple of very good institutional funds. They're still with us. Um and uh they it was more money enabled me to grow the team and uh hire our first salesperson. I've got a funny story for that. I'm standing there in the co-working space um with uh some of our early developers that two of them are still with us by the way actually three of t h, and you know, it's also where all all of my family and the kids grandparents and stuff are. (22:43) Um, and uh, in a way it's eating our own dog food because we use our own product more by doing that. But COVID hit and it was this big growth in all of the sudden people realizing that the old castle and moat uh, model is is not keeping up anymore. Um it was also around that time that so for the first probably three or four years of the company existing there really were no true apples to apple s completely unprecedented and that actually makes sales easier. But anyway, um long story short, made it to a series A during COVID. (24:26) Um that was really difficult. Um had a bit of help there uh from someone who was with us for a while. He's no longer with us but he was with us for a while in a business operations uh point of view. That was a big help there. Um got a series A and we're continuing to grow and I'm wearing too many hats. Um and this is where I introduce uh this where I intro w. He was introduced he Yeah. Hello. Uh, he was introduced to me by uh, so he was a zero tier user before he was CEO of Zero. Wonderful. uh he was introduced to me uh by one of our uh one of our investors who has taken a very active role. Uh I like this guy a lot. (26:11) Uh he's um should I should I mention who it is? I guess it's public. Greg Castle at Anorak. Yeah, Anarak Ventures. Um but um but he introduced me to uh Andrew and uh we hit it off pretty well. And so I basically hired him to re promise of connecting the whole world um (27:25) simple which is what zero tier is trying to do, right? Yeah. So, I' I'd love to hear what parts of my history really appeal to you, Adam, but I we'll get to that. So, I um I started off I grew up in Scotland. Real quick, um one of them is uh I can usually tell talking to somebody for about 10 minutes if they actually know what they're talking about or not. (27:44) So, you passed that one. That was a big one. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I grew up in Sc omething that seemed scary or maybe I couldn't do and go for it. Um just, you know, see where the world would take me. Um I ended up at the European Space Agency. That got me uh across to Europe. I was in the Netherlands for almost 10 years I think. Um I was at the agency first as a programmer. (29:03) Then that's what got me into telecoms and networking um Vo traffic um connecting all the sites. Uh from there I went on to work at um UPC Broadband which is owned by Liberty Global which I describ od, I started programming again, which I hadn't done in a number of years. I've been a project manager. Um, and got sucked into trying into what became Guy, a video game streaming startup. (30:25) Started out as let's try and reduce the friction of streaming video games. And that led to the pivot. YouTube was web 2.0 was big back then. Um, can we get video games to run online in the browser? Could we stream them? Um, long story short, that brought me to America, couldn't raise money in Europe. ( sidered live in the industry. Wow. (31:51) Um so anyway after after that exit um kind of put my investor hat on became an angel on the west coast um invested into Oculus VR Magic Pony um Flexport MX you 100 odd companies I'm involved with and um a GP at 7% Ventures in London. So very much the VC hat on but always wanted to get operational again always wanted to get back into it. (32:16) Um I had been using zero tier myself. So 2018 2019. Wow. Um when did we start talking about him? I guess late the market about that. So um that zero tier had already millions and millions of users and there's such draw was u amazing really stood out to me. (33:31) Um and again that mission it's one I share right when you when you go to the Windows control panel and look up networking you still see IP addresses you still see um DHP you see acronyms DHCP NAT the kind of acronym the user of an operating system should not see and zero just solves that instantly it's like a connective glue over the top it's . That's awesome. It completely will find a way out um and and work. Uh probably because it looks like DNS traffic, but that's that's so amazing. Hey, quick sidebar, quick post. (35:02) I've I found that the time we we were running low on time. So, what I've actually done, I've gone and extended my Zoom my Zoom trial. So, we've got unlimited time now because I feel like this conversation was going really well, but I didn't want to I didn't want to rush it down to just seven minutes. So, we're ac Okay. It works, right? I don't really have to think about anything else. It's just it's magic. (36:21) And then of course, one of the huge side effects from that security, right? You now all your ports, services, everything's protected. And it's I think a lot of what business sees in zero tier is that security angle, right? It's very easy. It's much easier to write a business case around security than it is around your network engineers gaining back some brain space because they don't have to k lly network guys, but want to get something working really simply without giving away the security. (37:43) So I think what you've articulated there is perfect in terms of the both sides of the use cases. There's a spectrum here where it works. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. And I think it's it's a bit of a cliche, but I genuinely believe if everyone in the world use your if networking was zero tier or something very like it, the world would be a better place, right? It wouldn't just be easier, but it wo all this kind of stuff, right? Um and it was a mismatch of every of different technologies to use. (39:11) Um then I remember one of them broke. So fundamentally the whole thing fell apart. Okay. And then finally after the pressure of years of you got to check out Zero Terror. I installed it. I it's I've got to say the simplicity of the install is something that's very high highly, you know, tickable as well in terms of it's so much like well what do I do? Well, you just kind of install here. ( wth. Oh yeah. (40:27) I mean I I think the phases I mean we still have people that use it for that of course uh as well as a lot of a lot of gamers and stuff like that but we've um as we've grown we've gotten into industrial applications and data centers and uh drones and satellites and aerospace and oil wells and all kinds of interesting things. Yeah. (40:49) Yeah. I think one of the it's a luxury problem but one of the problem that's hard from a business point of view was yours here is it's ca and you want all of them to be remotely accessible. You want all of them to be, you know, on the same network, secure, reachable for the service rep who might be in a different continent. Um then through to um several dual use cases like drones is a good one, right? you there's no um there's no more adversarial network environment than being on a drone in a military zone because someone is actively trying to take down your network and most people don't literally Yeah. (42:22) Yeah. Yeah. You mo usly people come past and you're used to selling your company at a conference. over half the people that show up like, "Oh, we use zero tier." And then spend 10 minutes pitching to me how amazing it is in their use case and then they're incredibly excited to get a walk away with target. Yeah. (43:33) And and you know what I mean I've experienced that and it's it's not it's not in the zero tier world but in the backup world with veh when veh was rising up the razor. Same sort of thing like you'd r reason I need to restart the router or (44:37) log into the router and I saw the open ports that someone previously who stared at it at the Airbnb had opened up on the router, right? Um it's, you know, we we really are out there. It's it's becoming more of a fabric of I think which is great, right? Yeah, the fabric is a good way to describe it. (44:58) And I guess to to to put so the use cases are there IoT, embedded systems, remote work, edge computing, industrial automation, drones, which I f traffic that you want. (46:16) Um one when it when it was first released some of the stories I got was people um playing old DOSs games that speak IPX over here. Um, and we have we have we have we have users in the field that are using it to send a protocol that I've never personally had contact with called canvas over Ethernet to the cloud which uh is so you can do stuff like that with it. (46:46) Um it also has uh it's it's those are deep technical things but also in terms of its focus um it uh poss maybe more possible in the future in certain ways to be able to run it yourself and run it in an airgapped environment or a private environment or a mobile environment that is not always connected to the internet or with transient connectivity and it will function just fine. (48:26) And it can be and a lot of things you can you can self-host them as a disconnected network. But what we have is something that you can self-host and it still interoperates with everything else which is is kin s per person meaning per human but the same analysts will tell you that in 10 years there'll be 125 billion devices online and the number of humans ain't growing that fast but the robots are coming right the drones are coming and not just the flying drones but the every car in 10 years will be an internet connected device, right? It's (49:54) not necessarily behind a human. It might be carrying a human. It might be carrying your kids, right? It's requirement for connectivity is almost more impor s already there. It's already happening. You guys just don't know about it yet. So I thought that was really interesting. I don't know how true the truth of that is and I was people were a bit shocked at that. But when you think about it, why wouldn't car manufacturers be inserting telemetry data right now? And they they they are because it's all circuitry, right? So yeah, that's an really interesting, you know, way to look at it is that the need for, you know, the the edge devices, what we call o zero tier, right? I think that Adam said is way well ahead. We might still be five years ahead, right? But the world is getting there, right? We just have to keep building for it. (52:24) I I just had a thought about it as well, like, you know, maybe in 10, 15 years, maybe even shorter, you know, an internet of thing device might be inside one of us, right? And just imagine a zero tier is working inside of you. I think that's really an interesting kind of concept. I could see I could see medic m of the original team but it was an open-source project and it was very much a project where the people g came and it grew to a project at massive scale but I think it lacked some of the I call them packaging Right. Yeah. (53:51) Adam hears me say this all the time. The packaging around the product. The core core product works. Yeah. I've been here well over a year. We've yet to see a single bug in the core product. It's stable. It's reliable. It's there. You can always add some bells and whist boxes they have to take off before they can use it so I think a lot of what how I've steed the company since coming on board is kind of push reinforcing to everyone how important these things are even if they're not really network engineering in fact again Adam like like I I frequently say there's you know there's the 8020 rule um zero has the 80% then there's the 20% of packaging and of course it turns out that that's the second 80% because it turns out there's so much work and so much build s rise officially is just like the icing on the cake, right? So, I think that's that's pretty (56:34) much the way that I see it. And interestingly enough early on we said I think the biggest problem with zero tier or someone said it is that people struggle to understand what you guys do right um so if you were to I'll ask you both just to finish off I'll start with Andrew first so you know if people if people was to ask you what does zero tier do what would be your sort of pitch well usually the or machines. So, it's uh kind of like making a channel on Slack or Discord and adding a bunch of things to it, except it's not people you're adding, it's devices. Love that. (58:15) And when they're in that channel, they can all talk to each other no matter where they are. They don't need to care where they are, and it just works. Uh on the very technical end, I would go back kind of to the beginning and I would say um we want to make it possible to do networking as if the whole planet is one da ier with the scaling hitting the enterprise making it more known more than it is and that enthusiast sort of the natural growth (59:46) that Adam built at the start. It's a great story. It's a great product.