From Joyent to Federated: Building Cloud Innovation and Disrupting Big Tech, with David Young

This transcript has been generated using AI technology. There may be errors or discrepancies in the text. The opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the show or its hosts.

Susan Sly 00:00
Hey there, your friend Susan here. I hope you're having an amazing day, and I want to thank you for dropping by the show. You know, it's interesting — I've been doing this show for several years and hundreds of interviews, including everyone from Jesse Itzler, who's famous for Living With a SEAL (who was David Goggins), to Glen Stearns, the first Undercover Billionaire on Discovery. And I always say to the team, “Okay, this guest is the best yet... the best yet.”
Well, today's guest is remarkable. He saw the internet and its capabilities long before other people did. He built a company and a platform that was used by Twitter, by Tumblr, by LinkedIn — and he was fired from his own company because he became an addict. And in this episode, we're going to talk about how he comes back from that, how he finds his purpose, how he goes on to build other companies, and how he is democratizing technology in a very new and innovative way.
And I will say — this is an episode for the soul, especially for my fellow founders out there.
So before we get into the episode, one of the things that's been happening for me personally lately — a lot — I’m renovating a house, been moving, building thePause™ Technologies, and of course, being a woman who's 52 years old... my gosh, I've got a lot going on. But I've actually been sleeping really, really well.
And the trick to that for me is a product called Harmonia. Harmonia is all-natural. It is the thing that has been helping me sleep really deeply, and it is something that I didn't know my body needed until I started to take it. So you can go to SusanSly.com, click on the "Trusted Partners" tab, scroll down to Isagenix, and it will take you to Harmonia.
And if you are a woman — I would say 30-plus, 40-plus — who is struggling with your sleep, it is fantastic. And I encourage you to check it out and the other Isagenix products. It's absolutely changed my life.
And the next thing I'll say is — for those of you following along in the adventures of building thePause™ — that company is absolutely crazy and beautiful. We've been getting a ton of tremendous feedback, and the way that we're building software is very iterative.
So, we have a private Facebook group called Pivot with thePause™ . If you are a woman 30-plus, you are welcome to join. We're talking about everything — from pivoting careers to relationships to health — and that is where we have the opportunity for people who want to get on an early beta version of our app.
It is paid — it's only $3.99 a month or $29.99 for the year. You lock it in, you’re able to vote on features, to give us feedback, and literally — to share a story. We had a poll in there: “What was the number one feature you wanted?” And overwhelmingly, it was meditation.
So our team, within two weeks, put meditations in the app, and the number one meditation in there is the sleep meditation, which was recorded by yours truly.
So anyway — it is fantastic. Check it out. There's so much engagement happening, and I would just encourage you — go onto Facebook, search Pivot with thePause™ , join the Facebook group. It's absolutely free.
So, today's episode — I get to interview David Young. David is an OG founder. He created Node.js. If you're techie and geeky, you know exactly what that was. And that company, Joyent, sold for $170 million to Samsung.
But two years prior to the sale, he was released as the founder, and we are going to talk about what that was like — that changing point in his life. How he changed an addiction to alcohol into something a lot more healthy — fitness. David has completed 10 Ironmans and he's done over 40 Half Ironmans.
And we’re also going to talk about his latest venture, where he is scaling technology and democratizing it in a very different way — allowing people to protect their data and to get open-source tools that help them grow, scale businesses, and save money.
So even for startup founders who might have two to three employees — Federated is something they can use.
I want to invite you — whatever it is you're doing: going for a run, going for a walk, listening in your car — enjoy this episode. I took pages of notes. And most importantly, if this episode is helpful, leave a five-star review. I do this podcast with so much love for all of you because I know how tough it is to start and scale businesses. And I read every single one of your comments.
So with that, I invite you to join my conversation on Raw and Real Entrepreneurship with the founder and CEO of Federated — Mr. David Young.
Voice Over 05:21
This is Raw and Real Entrepreneurship — the show that brings the no-nonsense truth of what is required to start, grow, and scale your business. I am your host, Susan Sly. Well, what is that? Raw and real.
Susan Sly 05:36
Entrepreneurs, wherever you are in the world today, I hope you're having an amazing day. And you know, when we see a show guest application come through, it's not very often that I get so excited that I want the person's autograph.
And you know, on the show, I have interviewed some incredible people — Glen Stearns, the first Undercover Billionaire, Jesse Itzler of Living With a SEAL, you name it. But when this one came through, I said to our team, "Yes, yes, yes!" because he is an incredible Ironman athlete, the, you know, OG of Node.js — which, if you don't know what that is, we'll get into it.
And I think we could have kept talking before we actually did the show. But David, I'm just so deeply honored to have you on Raw and Real Entrepreneurship.
David Young 06:25
Thank you, Susan. It's great to be here, and I don't know how we connected, but I'm glad we're going to have this great conversation.
Susan Sly 06:32
Well David, we have a running poll — and you'll appreciate this as a technologist — are entrepreneurs born or are they made? And so, one of the questions I ask everyone is: What was your first business that you ever had?
David Young 06:52
Yeah, you know, that's a good question, because actually, I never wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to be an academic. And I grew up in a family — my father was a Lutheran pastor — so it was very bookish. We sort of did a lot of reading, we talked about big ideas. He encouraged that. I loved to read. I always read.
And so when I went off to college, I did a degree in Ancient Greek. So, you know, I had no intention of being in technology or being in business.
And as I came out of college — you know, it's funny — I was applying to PhD programs with every intention that I was going to go on, get a PhD in Classics, you know, teach Ancient Greek, study poets like Pindar (which was an ancient Greek poet that I studied a lot of).
But I had this very interesting conversation. Two things happened — I had a great conversation with the head of the department at the University of Chicago, and he said, "You know, I get this sense that you wouldn't be very successful as an academic."
And you know, I had great grades, I had great recommendations, so I was a little bit taken back — but I listened to him. I talked to my dad and some others, and I listened to him.
And then something came in from New York. They said, "We have this program at Salomon Brothers where we look for folks that have done a lot of liberal arts to sort of bring them in." It was sort of, I guess, an early version of diversity — where they wanted not just quants and math people, but they wanted people like me, you know, that loved poetry and things like that.
So literally, the first real professional job I had was on Wall Street. But when I got there, it was a real eye-opener for me. And that professor at the University of Chicago was right in his intuition.
It was a mind explosion — the sort of combination of business and technology — you could just do anything and everything.
So I didn't have my own business, but I quickly sort of gravitated and started working on things. And that's when the web came out.
You know, literally — as you can see, I'm a little bit old from the white hair — but I saw the web, and I was like, "Well, this is going to change everything."
And so I really started to... some of the early projects that I did were: How can we invest in the web?
I went to my management, I sort of convinced them, "We need to figure out how to invest in this and really get behind it." And that's what I did.
And so in some ways — even though I was working for someone else — I was building these small little businesses within this big financial behemoth, trying to figure out ways that we could apply this technology.
And I guess, you know, in some ways... the rest is history.
Susan Sly 09:57
Look, the fact that you saw it—it—not everyone saw it, right? And when we think about the internet as it was in its first iteration, and going back in time, David, and thinking about those first touches of technology...
I've spoken about my father, who passed in 2024, many times. He was a brilliant engineer, and in the '80s, I wanted video games—and he said, "Code them yourself." So the first games I started building were those logic games, like just the word logic.
And David, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen The Big Bang Theory, but I was watching it the other night with my youngest daughter, and Sheldon—he has one of those '80s logic video games, and it's driving him crazy. And I remember those games.
What was your first touch with technology? Because again, not everyone saw the internet. Some people were afraid of it. You and I lived through Y2K. There were all sorts of things going on prior to that in the '90s where people just thought it might be a fad. But you didn’t.
So where—or when—did you first get your technology touch point, so that would give you the reference point to see the value of what was there?
David Young 11:20
Yeah, I mean, you know, when I was growing up, we had a TRS-80 computer, and we did those sorts of things, like you're mentioning—where we, my brothers and I, would code little games and sort of trade cassette tapes with each other.
But I really didn’t care about that stuff. I think—when I’ve thought about, well, why is it that I sort of came in contact with this—I had a very semantic education. Meaning, I learned about language and about words. And so that’s how I still think about technology—sort of getting across ideas to people.
And when I saw the web, I just said, "Well, this is an entirely different way of publishing, and it’s going to democratize the ability for people to express ideas—and no one’s in charge."
I think there was a certain libertarian maybe—or sort of, you know, I-don’t-want-to-have-to-color-within-the-lines approach—that, when I saw the web, it was like, "Well, I just need a text editor and I can write HTML." I'm not even certain that CSS was available then.
But you know, I could write these pages, and I could publish them, and people could actually use them. And I could connect them to other things over a network and begin to make useful ways of publishing. That was very, very valuable to me.
And I think that’s sort of the thread that goes through my career in technology—democratization. Sort of the democratization and the ability for people to express their ideas, you know, without needing to go to a central source and get permission.
Susan Sly 12:59
I love that you said that. Because as you were elucidating on that, I think about this accessibility to generative AI.
When I started in AI in 2018—in big enterprise AI—AI was not accessible. And then we've seen what’s happened with ChatGPT, with Gemini, with models.
And I also think about, you know, cryptocurrency, and like you said, not coloring within the lines, and these new technologies that are very accessible to people.
You started Joyent with this whole notion in mind of disruption. Were you thinking disruptive at the time? Or what was the thought process when you started that company?
David Young 13:47
Well, so Joyent was a company that I founded and built with a number of great colleagues. It was really the first cloud computing company. Before there was Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud and all this—there was Joyent.
We were the first ones to offer virtual machines. And even before virtual machines, we were the first ones to offer containers. No one wanted containers at the time—they're all the rage now. So that’s a whole lesson to be learned about timing.
But you know, Joyent was the first to offer these sorts of things over the web. And there was a simple reason for doing that. I’d been the CTO at another SaaS company, and it was all built on top of Sun servers, Oracle databases—all these very expensive pieces of software and hardware.
I left that company, and I was starting to think about the next thing. I was looking around, and I noticed that there were some really great open-source tools: open-source databases, open-source… you know. And the thought was—would it be possible to build environments where people could get access to these tools quickly again, over the internet?
So it’s another form of publishing, where we’re taking these tools and we’re publishing them on the web so that people can use them, and take them up, and use them very well. And that’s what I did.
I showed it to John Gruber, who’s a big Macintosh blogger now at DaringFireball.net, and I said, “This is what I’m thinking.” And he’s like, “Well, that’s really, really great.” So we started to build on top of that.
You know, like any company, you pivot. You figure out the first version isn’t quite what you want. And we were very lucky that Sun actually started to open-source some of its own technology, and we began to incorporate that.
But the company ended up being very foundational to the growth of a lot of Web 2.0 companies. In the sense that they were able to get this technology and build things like—Twitter was on top of us, Tumblr was on top of us, the Facebook Developer Program was on top of us.
And I think this was all possible because the tools were just so inexpensive. So again, this word democratize—anyone could come in and begin to build these incredible things.
People have to remember that prior to the cloud, you needed to have either a rich uncle or a rich dad—or someone like that—to give you the money. Because it was going to be very expensive to get the servers and the software that you needed to build your project.
And so the cloud really allowed for so many different ideas to bloom. And I'm really, really happy that we were able to do that at Joyent.

Susan Sly 16:46
Well, the first encounter I had with you was actually in my studies at MIT. So I went back and I studied at Sloan, and then I studied in executive education in the engineering department.
So we really took a look at what you did—and that onset with containerization, VMs, cloud—which was groundbreaking.
And to take a look at it now, decades later, and to say, “This is the technology that is now being used…”
As we’re having this conversation, there also seems to be this interesting awareness that’s coming to me, David, about how Greek philosophy is playing into this. Just in terms of how you look at this—and you’ve mentioned democratization—and thinking about democratization, accessibility… how do we create foundations that other people can build on?
It’s like your life’s Opus.
You ended up selling that company, and I’m always interested in how the acquisition happened. Because you scaled the company. You had big brand-name customers.
How did it come about that you would be acquired by Samsung?
David Young 18:16
Yeah, well, there's a little bit of history here, and I've been very open about this. I don't even know if it's still on the web, but I'm sure it's in some—
You know, I actually left the company a couple years before Joyent was acquired by Samsung. And the reason I left is—
You know, to be honest, startups are very, very difficult. And the way I dealt with the stress and the sort of grind of the startup was—I drank. And, you know, the drinking caught up with me and, you know, really destroyed, for a bit of time, my ability to really engage with the company.
And so, you know, I’m not ashamed to say it. It was a shameful thing. But I got fired from my own startup.
Now, I still had a big ownership stake in the company. I wanted the company to succeed, and thankfully, you know, we had the right people in place to sort of find the deal. And that—you know, that’s something that I did. I brought a lot of great people in that continued to build on this vision. But you know, those are the folks that sort of made the deal with Samsung.
And it made a lot of sense, because by this time, the big super-scalers—what we now call the big super-scalers—Google and Amazon—were really sort of making it difficult for us and our business.
Our business strategy was to go to telcos like Telefonica, SingTel, and others, and sort of give them clouds. And so Samsung was one of those. And today, if you're using a Samsung device, you're on a Joyent cloud of some sort. That’s where all their mobile devices put their storage and their other services.
So it was a very fortunate outcome.
You know, as you and I were talking before we started this recorded conversation—startups are really, really tough. And there’s a certain amount that you can control, and that you can control the outcome, and a certain amount that is, frankly, just down to dumb luck.
And I always remember people like Bill Gates talking in this way—that at a certain point, the odds are stacked against us as startup founders, and we just have to work as hard as possible.
You know, thankfully I got myself cleaned up, and I've been sober for 13 years. I'm very happy for that, very proud of the work that I've been able to do there. But, you know, we do our best. And it’s a very hard thing to do.
The funny thing is—post Joyent, I thought, “Well, I’m done with startups. This is just way too much for me.” And I actually put in my application to a few places, and I’m kind of proud of this now—at the time it was a little depressing—but they said, “You’ll never fit within a big corporate environment. You have to be in a place where you need to be able to create.”
And that’s, in fact, you know—once you catch this bug, as you know, Susan—once you catch this bug, where anything is possible, where we write stories—and our pen is the ones and the zeros of the technology—but we write stories for customers. And that’s a very intoxicating, powerful thing that we’re privileged to be a part of.
Susan Sly 21:44
And thank you for sharing about that journey. And it is really hard. It is really hard.
There have been—I lost my back teeth. I won’t show you my teeth, David, but from grinding. They literally fell out. Years and years of raising funds—especially building what we did in Radius—building something, selling something that didn’t yet exist. It existed, but it didn’t—it had never been scaled.
And dealing with the nuances of: how do you explain it and create the value to the people? To all of it. And I think it aged me. There’s no question.
If I hadn’t had that foundation in fitness, I could have easily turned to something else. There’s no question.
And then doing it a second time... someone said to me, “David, you seem to be moving really fast.” And I said, “Well, if you’ve done it once, you know there’s a checklist.” And you kind of just—you know, I could wake David up at two in the morning and be like, “Okay, you’re starting a startup,” and he’d be like, “Okay, gotta do this, this, this, this, this...” And it’s just that level of experience.
But it’s so hard. I mean—to do Ironmans, and you’ve done 10, about 40 halves, all kinds of endurance sports. And we were also talking about Gregory Shepard, who’s been on the show twice. He does a lot of adventure racing and things.
You turned that addictive personality into endurance sports—which can be construed as another addiction. How did you start in triathlon?
David Young 23:38
Oh, well, I mean, I started in triathlon because I was just—I was perplexed. Like, why can't I stop drinking destructively? You learn that you just have a part of your physical makeup, your chemistry, where the drug or whatever is so powerful that you really can’t touch it. There’s no way to do it the right way.
But I started in endurance athletics to try and figure—like, well, there’s no way that I can do an Ironman and drink the way that I’m drinking. So, guess what? I could do it. And so you sort of figure that out.
But I love endurance athletics. I love Ironman. I love, you know, the crazy long bike riding. And I think one of the reasons I like it—yes, it helps you become fit—although there is research that says, you know, some of this crazy, sort of over-the-top endurance sport is bad for the heart, bad for the hips, bad for... you know, it wears on the body.
But what I really liked about it—and I forget where this term is from—but this idea of a community of pain, where you’re sharing a really hard task. And that’s what we do in startups, right? They’re little communities of pain.
The ones that are functional—we’re all working together as a team. Or, you know, there are all sorts of ways to describe what happens in a startup. We’re like bands, like a rock band, where we each have our thing that we need to do. Or we’re like a restaurant, where we’re all sort of getting the plate ready for the customer.
Whatever the right metaphor is, I think another way to talk about it is this idea of a community of pain—where we’re doing a really hard thing together. And that’s really, really exciting.
And so you can get that from endurance sports too. And I think that’s why—as I shared—I’ve done a lot of Ironmans, but I’ve also done a lot of talking to other age group athletes. And a lot of them are, you know, they’re just sort of stuck, so to speak, in their nine-to-five. But they get a real sort of benefit, and sort of connection, in this community of pain when they’re doing Ironman. It’s really, really exhilarating.

Susan Sly 25:57
Community of pain. I heard Zuckerberg on the Acquired podcast talking about progress through suffering. Yeah.
And I only did the Ironman once—because, you and I were talking—I’d been diagnosed with MS at 27. I didn’t tell my agent or my sponsors or anyone that I was sick. And I ended up fracturing my pelvis in a training ride. I knew I would never do another Ironman.
And so I flew to Malaysia anyway. And, you know, it was really that faith and determination that attracted the situation that allowed me to do it.
I think about my training schedule back then, and my burning question for you is: How did you find the time to train and be building a company? And what did your training schedule look like?

David Young 26:55
Oh, well, I mean—yeah, it can be all-encompassing or all-engrossing, the training.
I think I was doing 18–20 hours a week, at least. You know, the normal thing where you’re doing three swims a week—you’re swimming probably two or three thousand yards per swim. You’re doing three bikes—maybe a couple with work—and then a long bike on Saturday. And then, you know, three or four runs, and the big run on Sunday. The pretty standard thing.
But it was all worth it because it helped me have a purpose outside of work and get through some of the difficulties.
And then, you know, it was also a way to build community within Joyent. We were doing Joyent, and that’s where I met my wife—through triathlon. She’s still very, very involved and continues to do Ironmans and halves and all the rest of it.
But, you know, you make time. These days—as I mentioned—it is hard on the hips and the joints. I’ve had to have some reconstructive surgery, so I’m not doing it as much. But I get out and I get on the gravel bike or something like that.
And you just... there’s a sort of endorphin high that you can get from these things. You always feel better. You always feel better after you’ve done it—maybe not right away.
And the fact of the matter is, in a startup, you’re never done. You’re only done, maybe, when you get acquired. And then—I don’t know—you’re really never done.
So I can be very, sort of damaging to myself, thinking, “Well, I should go do this,” or “I would benefit from doing a ride or a run or a walk or whatever—but geez, I have to get this done or that done.” And it’s never-ending.
And I have found, through experience, that if I do take the time to do a little—what we call today—self-care, I do benefit. My work is better. I sleep better. I restore better. Everything sort of works out better.
That’s been my experience.
Susan Sly 29:17
Well... and when you're not training for something—where you haven’t entered and you have the email that says, “Okay David, you’re doing the Tempe Half,” or whatever it is—so it’s that mind over matter, right? So I’m choosing to...
One of the things I did even yesterday—there’s a gal who’s an LP at a fund that we’ve pitched for our seed round. And she was like, “Do you want to meet up?” I said, “Do you hike?” And she’s like, “Yeah, I love to hike.”
So we went for almost a two-hour hike and meeting. And so I’ll try to do that as much as possible as well, because I find—for me, having been an endurance athlete—if I don’t move my body, then I don’t perform at my best.
David Young 30:06
Right, right. Exactly.
Susan Sly 30:09
Go ahead—yeah, yeah.
David Young 30:11
I mean, it’s... and there’s always a reason not to do it. But you know, like I said, whenever I do it—and I try to be as regular as possible—I always feel better.
Susan Sly 30:24
Yeah, absolutely.
One of the questions I have for you—because a lot of... I mentioned Zuckerberg, and now he’s posting all these adventure-y kind of things he’s doing. And a lot of founders, they either do sports or they play music or something.
And I wrote this down: a purpose outside of work. Would you speak to the founder listening right now who doesn’t have a purpose outside of work? What do you want to say to them?
David Young 30:59
Yeah, you know, I was at a CEO conference last May, and it was put on by Kickstart, which is one of our investors. And I was very impressed—because you hear often, especially in VC-backed startups, these stories about VCs saying, “Yeah, I know your baby’s about to be born, but we need you to do this,” because it’s all about the company—and these horror stories.
And I was very impressed because they put on this conference where the theme was CEO health and taking care of yourself.
Because when you’re a founder, it can be a very, very lonely situation. You have a vision for a product and a vision for a go-to-market, and most of the time it doesn’t work. You know? It’s just the fact, right?
We try and begin to execute, and some things are working. But you have to continually tell yourself...
You know, this is Ancient Greek. The Greeks had this verb tense called the optative tense. And we know the optative tense in English because that’s when our VC calls up and says, “How are things going?” And you say, “Oh, they’re great! You know, we just sold this and we just sold that.”
And maybe you didn’t exactly sell it—but you know it’s going to happen. You know it’s going to happen. That’s the optative tense. And the entrepreneur has to live in the optative tense.
They have to sort of live in the present—doing the work that they need to do—and then the future, the near future, where what they’re trying to bring to life is going to happen. And they have to be in that position.
And that’s a very exhausting—psychologically very difficult—it’s almost psychopathic in some ways. You know, it’s almost like the psychopath.
But we’re not—we’re good psychopaths. Because we’re building these very interesting products and bringing these companies to life. But it can be very, very taxing.
And so, if you can find something—
You know, I was listening to someone... the CEO of Palantir—name doesn’t come... Carp. Sorry, I don’t remember his first name. But he shoots. He shoots guns. He’s a sharpshooter. That has nothing to do with Palantir, per se.
But if you can get out of something and be excellent at something else—
Whether it’s sports, whether it’s ham radio, it can be all sorts of things—it really does give you an opportunity.
It can be your family, by the way. For goodness’ sake, let’s not forget our spouses, our family, our friends. That is really restorative because it gives us a chance to stop performing.
You know, as actors—I don’t know if this is making sense—but this is what I’ve learned for myself: If I just stay on stage and I’m performing... after a while, I’m not as effective. And it sort of spins up to a point of diminishing return.
Susan Sly 34:15
Absolutely. And it's exhausting. I love how you talked about the performing, because that piece of it—
One of the things I’ve said to my husband is, sometimes I feel like the doll, and you wind her up in the back, and then she goes, right? And she’s on the stage, and she’s doing all the... you know, raising the money, and in the dev meetings, and doing it all.
And this is, David—even for me, as we're doing the interview—this is real. I will throw myself into academia, which I’m not in right now, because I said, “Okay, I’ve been doing that for years. I’m stepping out of academia, building this company.” But I don’t have something that I’m training for—like Ironman—or something that I’m doing, other than just working out.
And I think what I wrote down, that you said, is get out of something excellent and be doing something else that’s excellent. You know—just to give that perspective, which is huge.
David Young 35:16
I mean, no, you know, we can sort of get lost in our startups.
I had a triathlon coach—Chris How. And you know, he was a great coach. What he taught me is that—in triathlon—just try to do one little thing better today than you did yesterday.
And if you do that as a practice—
It was hard to do in the startup, believe it or not, because the startup is so all-encompassing and there are so many things to do. But in endurance sports, it’s like, well, I can do that. I can do one little thing better.
And that comes back into my practice in the startup, as far as, “What’s the next right thing that I need to do?”—something along those lines. So it’s very beneficial.
And at the end of the day, I try and have this attitude: Even if my startup blows up—well, that happens. In fact, most of the time, that happens.
But did I do my best? Did we all work? Were we trying to attack a big problem?
And you know, the rest of it, as I’ve already mentioned, is sort of up to chance, and up to good timing, and things that aren’t in my control.
So, you know, this outside effort—whether it’s endurance sports or something else—is a really good training for that sort of attitude. That’s what I’ve found.
Susan Sly 36:43
The luck and the chance—I think there are some ways to increase your odds.
Right? Hunger Games—“May the odds be ever in your favor.” And increasing the luck and the chance—because I’m looking at what you’re doing with Federated, which is so stinking cool.
And thinking about—as I’ve been researching you, preparing for the show—I feel like this particular startup is this combination of... I’m not even going to say David Young 2.0. I’m going to say like David Young 8.0.
Bringing in everything you’ve done to date—the democratization and scaling.
So let’s talk about Federated.
When did you get the idea for this? And how did you get it started?
David Young 37:38
Well, the idea came because I began to sort of notice that a lot of the big platforms—like Google and Windows, Microsoft, and even Apple—were beginning to use our data for advertising and training AI. And this bothered me.
Why did it bother me?
Well, first of all, it's not their data. And I think the courts are going to have lots to say about that in the future. A lot of these AI companies train on other people's data, and we’ll see what happens with that. But it just fundamentally seemed to me to be unfair.
And then that sort of also coincided with a lot of different viewpoints—and this is not a political statement, it's just a statement of human expression—were being de-platformed because they weren’t the “right” viewpoint. And I felt that that was something that was not appropriate.
So I sort of made it a personal mission to de... you know, it’s sometimes called a “de-Google.” I was going to get off these platforms as much as possible.
And as I began to look around and sort of reacquaint myself—not now with open source on the server—but what could be done with open source on the client, on the desktop... business software that people could use—I became very, very impressed with what was available.
The missing piece was—and it's always the case—there was no product. There was no sort of company that was bringing all these things together so that it was easy for, you know, my mother or someone who was not technical at all to be able to adopt these things and get the same freedom from surveillance, digital surveillance, digital de-platforming—sort of digital sovereignty—that I wanted for myself.
And that's really the fundamental mission of Federated Computer: to help people in their business today—someday maybe for everybody—but in their business today, to be able to apply an open-source, freedom-based makeover to their business.
And so we replace all the big companies. You know, whether you're using Mailchimp, or Zoom—we have open-source alternatives to all these things so that people get this privacy.
But it turns out that when you give people great open-source tools, a knock-on effect is they get an amazing price. So a typical Federated customer—and we have thousands of customers that we’re providing service to around the globe—a typical customer is saving between $300 and $400 per employee, per month, on their software expenses.
And so that’s really tremendous. And then they get to take that money—and as we were talking—when you're in a startup business or any business, we want to use our capital most effectively. So they can use that capital to hire another person, use it to advertise their business online, use it in ways that grow their business—rather than grow some SaaS software company’s bottom line.
If that makes sense.
Susan Sly 40:59
It does. It makes perfect sense.
And what is the average size of business that is a Federated customer? Because I noticed you have a vast array, right?
David Young 41:12
Yeah, it’s everything from like two-, three-person startups to—we have doctors' offices, legal offices, we have media companies, we have... you know, it’s everybody.
The good news for Federated Computer is that any business can use our software. They don’t have to...
And we have a very deep catalog of the different solutions that we can provide to people. So, you know, it’s just going to be one of those things where...
It’s interesting—in the early days of the cloud, I remember going to Visa and showing them what we’d built at Joyent, and being told by the CTO of Visa, “I will absolutely never use the cloud.”
And so, you know, that’s what happens with business. You just have to go out there. You’ve got to evangelize. You have to have the right message. You’ve got to get to the right decision-makers.
And that’s really where we are in the growth of Federated right now.
Susan Sly 42:11
Well, I love the mission.
And coming out of edge—like, processing the heavy data payloads where the data is being created...
For the people listening who are like, “What are they talking about?”—
And to be able to do that and just send metadata to the cloud, especially because vision is, you know, when we were at that company, we were talking about terabytes of data every single day that we were dealing with.
I want to step back for a moment, David. You said the big platforms are using our data—yeah—and I’ve spent a lot of time contemplating how we solve for this, right?
Especially because my new startup focuses on women’s health. And for the listeners—David probably knows this—but for the listeners: almost 70% of women’s health data comes from middle-aged white men.
So, we’ll take a look at cardiology data as an example. The recommendations women get for cardiovascular health come from men. And it’s because men volunteer for clinical studies. Women don’t tend to. And women’s hearts are different.
So we’re solving for perimenopause and menopause. And I won’t say the name of which company it was—because when it came out in the media, I was starting a new company—I had companies reaching out to me and offering me non-dilutive funding and stuff like that.
And I said—they said, “Well, why don’t you just buy the data?”
I said, “Because the data doesn’t exist.”
And so we created thePause™ with the premise that: One, we don’t need to know a woman’s name. We don’t need to know the actual day she was born. We are going to anonymize the data on the way in so that we can create a meaningful experience for her and create data that doesn’t exist to help these women.
And you—as you were talking—for the people who aren’t fully aware, could you do a very short master class just to give people perspective on what data these companies actually know about them?
David Young 44:18
Yeah, so this is something that I saw from the front row at Joyent.
We had a product—
Well, let me back up and say: if you shop at a Safeway or an Albertsons or something like that, and use one of their club cards—their loyalty cards—these companies make more money from selling the data on who’s buying what than they do from selling groceries.
You know, these are very low-margin businesses—groceries—but the data is very valuable to the food vendors and all the rest of it. So, you know, data has for a long time been very valuable.
It was the same business model for the pages and things like that—not to get too far down in the weeds—but at Joyent, we had a partnership with Facebook. And I was shocked. I was just floored by the amount of data that people would give to Facebook. And they still give.
So if you’re in touch with Facebook, or Apple, or Google—or, you know, many of these... you know, Zoom—we're using Zoom. And Zoom, last year, announced that—and they sort of walked this back—but they said, “We’re going to use all of your conferences, your private conferences, to train our AI and our advertising models.”
And this is a very tempting thing for these folks to do. Because when you have a proprietary software stack, you're going to either make money through selling to customers—but oftentimes they have a free version. And so the free version is a way to capture data from these folks. That’s how they monetize this thing.
Yes, they want you to move to the paid version, but the data is being hoovered up. And I congratulate you for anonymizing—but oftentimes—and this is what companies will say—but then, in combination with other sets of data, smart people can find out things about you.
And so what happens to that?
Well, people often say, “Well, I don’t have anything to hide.” But this data is being used to make decisions—on health care, on insurance decisions, on mortgage decisions...
It’s what used to be called attention data, so they begin to build profiles about me and you and others.
And that is not necessarily wrong.
What I object to is that I don’t have agency over that sort of body of data about myself. It’s being used, and I didn’t have agency—because I need email, I need video conferencing, I need the ability to share files with my colleagues.
And it wasn’t really available to me, because these open-source alternatives were so difficult to install and patch and back up and do all the rest of it.
That’s the mission of Federated—to give people an open-source alternative to these big platforms. So that they can, if they choose, come and say: “Well, I want email, and I want Office productivity, and I want CRM, and I want video conferencing.” All the different types of software that we want as SaaS software...
I can get it from Federated Computer, and my data is not going to be used to do these other things.
Susan Sly 47:46
Yeah. The Facebook piece is—you know, I always tell people: we should all have had shares, because we were complicit in training the largest facial recognition database in the world.
And I’m not saying Safeway and Albertsons, but I’ll just share with people too that when you combine vision with loyalty cards—and they’re time-stamped—then you also have that person’s... not just their buying or financial data.
You can have their license plate, which gives other demographic data. Their face. The list goes on and on and on.
And so when you’re talking about multimodal data sources...
The thing I’m really proud of in my previous company is that we did not do facial. We could have, but we chose not to—because it wasn’t necessary.
And a lot of these companies take more data than necessary.
The leading—David, this is disgusting—the leading period tracking app, they ask things that are not related to periods at all. And young girls are using this app. And there’s no reason they need that data.
And I think everyone needs to think about—
If you’re going to... data is a currency.
If you’re trading your data for something, then the question is: What value is it to you?
Right? And we all have to start to think about that.
David Young 49:09
Yeah, not to sound like a grumpy old guy, but I think Steve Jobs was sort of right—and we need to learn to just turn off. And we were talking about this... this comes back to having something outside of our job.
We need to learn to turn off and not be doomscrolling all the time. We need to sort of pick up a book. We need to go out into nature. There's nothing better than, you know, getting up in the mountains or swimming in the ocean. You really will find that your life is enhanced to such a degree.
And we’ve been conditioned to sort of—well, I guess I have to... if I’m going to be part of this, I guess I have to tell them my preferences on this, that, and the other—like you were saying with that menstrual app. And it’s everywhere.
And so Federated is just one little effort to sort of give people an alternative. We live in a digital age. We need these tools. We live in an age where people are not in the same office. We’re not using typewriters—I’m not saying that—but let’s have some alternatives so that we can make informed decisions.
And if we don’t want to be part of these big platforms, we do have alternatives. And, you know, I’m really glad that Federated can be part of that mission.
Susan Sly 50:30
Well, at MIT, one of the philosophies is “past behavior predicts future outcomes.” So I know Federated is—just given your personal ethos in democratization, in not coloring in the lines, and giving people their... you know, giving people their freedom—it is going to be a new standard that you're setting.
David, my final question for you is not related to technology or business.
So—Ironmans, Half Ironmans, all of these things—what's something that you haven't done yet that you want to accomplish in your personal life?
David Young 51:10
Well, the thing that just came up—I live in Colorado—so, you know, I would like to do the Colorado Trail, which is a 400-mile trail.
It’s a little bit of an endurance thing, but it’s also... you know, you’re out there, it’s logistics, it’s those sorts of things. And so, you know, that’s something I’m thinking about—trying to figure out how I can do something like that.
And you know, as I said, I just try and wake up every day... I have a spiritual practice that I try and put in place, so I can just be a little bit better.
You learn, as you are on this planet more and more, that sort of the big ambitions—it’s great to have those, let’s work for them—but it turns out that just being a good person for your spouse and for the people that are in your life, that’s a real achievement.
And so, you know, I’m trying to be that every day—for my coworkers and the people that are in my life.

Susan Sly 52:12
David, you are a beautiful and remarkable human. And I hope that everyone listening... we—David and I—would love, you know... leave a review. I actually read all of your reviews.
And thank you—we have many, many five-star reviews. I’m so grateful. And whatever it is that is touching you today from this episode, please let us know.
And David, I wish you every success on your entrepreneurial journey. If you need a crew on that 400... call me up. Let me know. That would be a lot of fun. More than happy to do that.
And thank you—on a very personal note—for inspiring me.
And I think... the Tempe Half Marathon—you’ve taken away my resistance to that swim.
David Young 53:04
Go for it.
Susan Sly 53:06
All right. Well, thanks again, David.
And for everyone listening, I just want to say—God bless, go rock your day, and I will see you in the next episode.
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And with that—go out there, rock your day, God bless, and I will see you in the next episode.

This transcript has been generated using AI technology. There may be errors or discrepancies in the text. The opinions expressed by the guests on this podcast are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the show or its hosts.