Podcast: Architectural Patterns: Moving Beyond Cloud-Native to Local-First - Insights from Adam Wiggins

Heroku co-founder Adam Wiggins argues for a 'local-first' architecture that reconciles cloud-based collaboration with local software performance and data ownership, leveraging CRDTs and version control primitives for non-code domains. He predicts a hybrid AI future where local models handle most productivity tasks, challenging the current reliance on centralized cloud compute.

In this episode, Heroku co-founder and Ink & Switch founder Adam Wiggins argues for a 'local-first' architecture that reconciles cloud-based collaboration with the performance and data ownership of local software. He explores the role of CRDTs and version control primitives in non-code domains, and examines how a hybrid AI future might leverage local models for core productivity tasks, challenging the current over-reliance on centralised cloud compute. Key Takeaways - Local-first is not a rejection of the cloud, but a necessary correction to the "everything-in-the-cloud" paradigm, prioritising offline capability and latency. - Technologies like CRDTs Conflict-free Replicated Data Types have matured sufficiently to move from academic prototypes to robust, production-grade infrastructure, as evidenced by tools such as Linear. - The next major productivity leap will occur when we bring Git-like version control primitives branching, merging, diffing to non-code domains like documents and spreadsheets. - The future of AI integration lies in small, high-performance local models that handle 80% of routine productivity tasks, with large cloud-based LLMs reserved for high-compute tasks. - Moving to local-first requires a realistic assessment of use cases; it is not a silver bullet, but a toolset for specific domains where latency and user agency are high-value differentiators. Subscribe on: Transcript Olimpiu Pop : Hello everybody, I am Olimpiu Pop, and in front of me I have Adam Wiggins. If you are like me, probably you will not know too much only by the name, so I will have to name a couple of what he did previously. And the two things that probably are more than enough as a CV for him is Heroku, and the other one is the 12-Factor App. So without any further ado, Adam, can you please introduce yourself? Adam Wiggins : Yes, thanks for having me, and indeed those are Heroku and 12-Factor App, although well in the past now, pretty foundational for my career. Yes, my name's Adam Wiggins, obviously a creator of all kinds of software, entrepreneur, and software engineer and designer and so on. Excited today to talk about local-first software, but if you go back in time, you know, I got interested in how computers can best serve human needs, and that led me through various paths to Heroku, kind of solving the deployment problem and making it faster and easier, and frankly more fun to get software out into the world and in front of your users. That led to the manifesto of the 12-Factor App. Following on from that, founded a research lab called Ink & Switch with some of my Heroku co-creators, and have been exploring the fringes of technology ever since. And again, all through this lens of how can computers improve human prosperity and make our lives as humans better, especially for things like art, science, creating things as opposed to consumption tasks. Olimpiu Pop : And also as an early consumer of Heroku, that was quite nice, and definitely it was easier. I liked the integration with GitHub at that point and how the things were going, but also the detail into how it looked. Because on the infra side, most of the people were, okay, it has to work. Most of them were using the terminal. But Heroku had nice colors, and nice naming, and you can see that there was a lot of interest into the details, and that was what I really enjoyed to get started on small, like, projects that then grew. But more than that, it seemed that always there is a purpose, and as you mentioned, it's how we can bring technology without being invasive in normal life. Maybe before getting more into your journey, because now we are discussing about local-first, and Heroku was a synonym of the cloud when cloud-native was still a word to be coined yet, what are your current projects with Ink & Switch? I had the conversation, I think last year around this time, with Savannah Kunovsky from IDEO. They are also very deep into this topic, how to make technology getting closer to the humans and actually adapting technology with to the human needs, especially in the interaction. Is that your target as well with Ink & Switch, or is broader? Software for More Productive Humans 03:22 javascript:void 0 ; Adam Wiggins : The charter for Ink & Switch for me—maybe others involved will see it differently—but the mission to me is always creating the operating system, and I mean that in a pretty loose sense, of how we use computers, but specifically for creation and for productivity. So I am sort of weird that I get excited about things like spreadsheets and word processors and calendars and email—these like classic information processing tools that we all really rely on in our daily lives, both for personal things but also obviously to do our work. And the modern information tools are how we create things—music, movies, but also science, etc. And the tools that are a joy to use and, you know, are fit to purpose can help us do these things better. If we can help scientists with better tools, they can have more breakthroughs, and that can help us in all the fields that science helps us, for example. But I think it's equally valuable to make better tools for art so that people can write better pieces or create more interesting films, that sort of thing. But I feel like it's often an under-invested-in area, or maybe gets less attention. I think that's changed a bit, you know. We started Ink & Switch in 2015, and back then, I think consumer products, social media, e-commerce, streaming video, that was really the hot place to be in technology. It was where a lot of the brains went. It's certainly where a lot of the design mindset went. And there's value to that, of course. I'm not against us using computers or people working on that area of technology. But we had this sense that like, this is something under-invested in. I think that again, that's changed since then. You know, maybe you have success stories like, you know, I don't know, someone like Notion or Figma, that have come along and said, 'Hey, let's take this what would traditionally be thought of as kind of a boring tool that doesn't have a very nice user experience and no one thinks much about, and make it something a little more interesting, powerful, creative, inspiring.' But I still think we have further to go. And so Ink & Switch works in the research space with that broad charter, and some of that will be more user-facing kind of end products, but some of it will be something like, again, those operating system level things of like, okay, well files have served us well for a really long time, but now we're more in the cloud and we like Google Docs style real-time collaboration, and in fact, the fact that you can share a document with someone by just sending them a URL. But there are some things that are great about files. That's especially revealing now as AI agents become more popular. Can we get some of the same of both of those things? Are there technologies that give us some of the benefits of the cloud and sharing, while also preserving some of the benefits of classic files? Another area of research for the lab, for example, is version control. Which I think version control is a foundational tool for all creative work, but really, only software engineers have access to it at this point. You know, Git and GitHub have obviously become fairly synonymous with revision control, but it has existed for a long time in our industry. And there are small versions of this, you know, lawyers have their redlining, for example, and some tools have, you know, version history built in, but it's very, very limited compared to what software engineers work with. So another track of research that Ink & Switch is on that I'm personally very interested in is, can we make version control the primitives of that accessible enough that anyone could use it? Anyone who's working a spreadsheet or a word processor or a calendar could have the equivalent of a pull request. Is that something within reach of, you know, mere mortals and not just software engineers? I think so, but there's a lot of research, both design and technology, to try to tackle that problem. Why Local First Matters 06:42 javascript:void 0 ; Olimpiu Pop : For me, the biggest challenge in this space, maybe because that's what I'm focusing on currently, is how to bring together hardware engineers, guys that are very focused on electronics and stuff like that, together with guys that are focused on software. And that's my daily headache because you have these guys that don't know what Git means and what a pull request means, what a diff should look like, and then you look at it, you have a new small piece of technology, a small piece of a condenser, for instance, that was added to the next version, and they cannot see it. I understand you because it's very important to be able to distinguish between versions. So well, good luck with that. Hopefully, you'll have a couple of breakthroughs on that as well. But getting back to the clouds or, well, to our laptops, because it feels like it's an 'un-Hobbit'. It sounds like a journey to the cloud and back again, to your local machine. So, was it something about the journey of making Heroku a simple and powerful tool for deploying to the cloud that got you into local-first? I understand what you mentioned about the part with Google Docs and the fact that you have something in the cloud, and then it's yours, but it's not yours. So at any given moment, somebody can unplug it, and then you can just paralyse everything you have. But what was your motivation? What are you searching for there using a local-first approach? Adam Wiggins : Yes, I like 'The Hobbit' comparison for sure. You know, when we started Heroku, the word 'cloud' wasn't even in use yet. Of course, back in those days, most enterprise software was written as Windows native apps. The web was finally getting powerful enough as an application platform that people started to build, and indeed, this was the business we were in, which was essentially, you know, enterprise workflows. Here's a bunch of inventory in a warehouse that needs to be tracked, and there's a database that's the canonical record for that; you need to point out documents, etc. And the web had finally become a really great platform for that, and the LAMP stack and all that kind of thing in the 2000s. But the deployment piece of it, especially at that enterprise level, you had to sort of share FTP hosts and so on. And then of course, if you were a big tech company, you'd, I don't know, have your own data centre or chunk of a data centre. But for that in-between space where it's like, okay, we're running a big warehouse, we have a serious software application, really, the answer was you rack and stack your own server or a couple of servers. So not huge scale, but you still needed to own that hardware, you needed to order the server, put it together, install it in the rack, install Linux, all this, you know, operations—what we would kind of DevOps didn't exist then—but all the operations to just keep it patched and up to date and deploy things and so on. So we got exposed to that, and it motivated us to build Heroku as a way to deploy more agilely. You know, the agile stuff had been happening on the development side of software, but the deployment and operational sides stayed very clunky. Things took weeks, sometimes months. And so Heroku was a solution to that: the idea of, hey, I've got this running piece of software on my laptop, now I want to kind of push a button, metaphorically or perhaps actually, and have a version of it that's running on the web. And VPS technology and virtualisation, Xen and so on, were making that possible for the first time. This is obviously when Amazon Web Services was first emerging as well. So, yes, we went down this whole journey, and I think it helped seed or create a concept of what later became serverless and the idea of trying to make deployment fast, easy, repeatable, things like config vars and so on. These are best practices, so you can just get your software out to your users, because I feel like software that isn't in users' hands has no purpose. You know, running on localhost or running on my computer, cool, but like, when you deliver value, that's when the user can use it. And that was what the cloud really excelled at. And then you go even further to that shared document metaphor again, the Google Docs or the Figma thing, where now I can send someone a link, and we can both collaborate on it in some way. That was just such a leap forward from 'here, let me email you an XLS file, you make some changes and send it back to me, perhaps with a slightly different file name.' So all of this was a great leap forward, and I think we were part of it with Heroku. But yes, it was through that process that I also saw some things we may have lost from the more classic file desktop application era. And so on the user side, there was that sense of control. You can talk about privacy obviously is a huge topic, but also just something like, I don't know, if I delete the file, I know it's gone, or if I want to make a backup, I can make a copy, or if I want to experiment on the file, I can make a copy of that and experiment on that and know the original won't be touched. There was this sense of control, ownership, and just agency that came with files. That was kind of on the user side. And then on the operational side, though, it really was the battle scars of running Heroku, which was that we were in the critical path for these huge mission-critical applications. Sometimes internal enterprise apps, sometimes more public-facing ones. And, you know, I personally was in charge of kind of that whole thing—the whole part of the company that was responsible for not only the product and its features, but keeping it online as infrastructure. And the experience of even a few seconds of downtime, let alone, you know, a 20-minute or a 40-minute downtime or something like that, and just very angry people. They're losing money, they're in trouble with their boss, their business is—if it's an e-commerce business or something, you can literally count the lost sales on your metrics dashboard. And they were right to be angry when we did have downtime, but it sort of left me with this feeling of like, wait a minute, do we really need every single thing that a person, that a user ever clicks on, does it absolutely have to route through all this complex infrastructure, go all the way to, realistically then it was East Coast United States, now hopefully a little more spread out? But it seems odd that we've created such a big stack of things that can go wrong for such simple operations, like checking a checkbox on a to-do list. And so that one-two punch of the pain of being in the critical path of running this infrastructure and thinking we could probably do less of that, and then the user-facing side of thinking there's something from files that maybe we've lost that we could bring back to the cloud era, for me, those two things were the gestation of what would become local-first. So, we as engineers, we over-engineer, and that's what we like to do. And that's an ongoing discussion, I think, in all companies that I have ever worked in, that we tend to forget the business case at any given moment in time, and we do a lot more than actually needed. And because in us, we have like two demons. One of them is very focused on engineering challenges: " Let's see if we can build that bridge, even if we actually don't need it.' And then it's about delivering value. And I think that's very important because I remember when I got started, in the early 2000s in Romania, the internet was still a scarce resource, and if you had internet, it was usually dial-up, so you couldn't imagine stuff in the cloud. And I think even in 2008, when I was studying, it was still a debate about what the cloud actually is. Now it's about the fact that I knew that even if I don't have internet, I have access to a lot of information. I have documents, I have stuff that I can use. But now, if at points there is a hiccup, and now with all the geopolitical battles going on all around, a couple of the data centres might be affected, and then if AWS catches a cold, the whole internet is sneezing, and we saw that several times in the last couple of months. But now we've got to the cloud, and especially in the banking era, you're based in Europe, and you know there is a lot of regulation, and a lot of banks had huge projects to move stuff from their '70s COBOL systems back to the internet. And now, we're going back to them and telling them, 'Okay, now let's go back,' or at least that's how it will sound if you just think about local-first. Olimpiu Pop : So, how would you approach it, putting back your CTO hat? How would you approach it? How would you advise people to view it, and what would be the main benefits for users? Adam Wiggins: Yes, I totally agree. I think you have to look at the business case, also what's realistic right now. I think it varies a lot by use case. We do tend to think of software, the web, the cloud, and so on as fairly monolithic, but there are so many different constraints or needs you might have for a particular piece of software. Furthermore, it is the case that these local-first technologies, which we started to explore and hopefully contribute to, but were very much on the bleeding edge of computer science circa late 2010s and early 2020s, and that's not something to bet your business on. But happily, for a certain set of use cases, there are some technologies that have emerged that are reaching a level of maturity now that I would actually bet the right kinds of businesses on it, and most of them are based around a thing called CRDTs, which is basically a merging type of data structure, and sync engines they sometimes call it, which essentially are, you know, we know sync from things like Dropbox or even back in the day, you know, with a BlackBerry or an iPod or something like that, but it's the idea that actually that basic technology of you have multiple nodes in the network—my computer, my phone, my collaborator's computer, the cloud, you know, main server—and that these things, rather than treating the server as just one big central source of authority, and every single other node in the network is just a very thin, very shallow cache, we say, 'Well what if these individual nodes can have their own either complete copy of a document, or complete copy of a database, or perhaps a more shallow copy of just the records that they need, the pages they have visited?' I think one of the early movers in this space that really showed what's possible with it is the company Linear, which makes ticket tracking software and has become beloved among developers and kind of is now in all the Fortune 500s. But one of the things people immediately said is, 'How can this thing be so fast?' And the answer is that it does this sync process where essentially you have in your browser, probably in the IndexedDB, you have essentially copies of all the tickets you've visited, and it's essentially whenever you click on something or update something, you add a comment, you mark the status as being different, it's first writing that to your local file system, and the UI can update instantly. There's no optimistic UI that pretends it's updated just to give the user a quick response. It really is writing into your local storage, and then there's a background thread that's perpetually syncing that with the server. And of course, that immediately raises questions about, well, how you handle conflict resolution. And indeed, there's a subfield of computer science that's been working on this for 15 years and has developed really good technical solutions that perform much better than you'd expect. But again, depends a lot on the domain. You know, for Linear, I think it works really well. People want something that's fast. They have these work groups with data sets that are, on the one hand, big but not enormous. They're not all the data in the world. And so for them, a sync engine was a really good solution very early on. Maybe there are other domains where something like that wouldn't work as well—banking probably comes to mind. But the basic idea is to keep in mind how I can do more on the local device, with the server still in an almost central coordinating role, without necessarily being the critical path for absolutely everything. If you start with that perspective and think through your use case on it and look at some of the technologies that are out there, the sync engines and so on, you very often find it's not that you make the whole software stack local-first, but there's parts of it, this can be adapted to get you those business benefits, to get you those benefits for your users in terms of user experience, performance, etc. The Balance of Cloud and Local Collaboration 18:27 javascript:void 0 ; Olimpiu Pop : So, the data type that you mentioned, CRDT, it's Conflict-free Replicated Data Types, so that's the base for most of the, let's say, sync engines, and that makes it available. And based on what you said, what I was thinking is that another good example of something that, I don't know, a couple of years back you wouldn't have thought was possible is BlueSky, or the AT Protocol. Just thinking about, well, Twitter, X now, all that amount of information that is out there, it's impossible to just have it, but the way AT Protocol was designed and thought, it actually provides you that perspective where you do own your data, you can just take it, or you can even host it yourself, whatever is needed. I feel that now we are kind of trying to correct the push for the cloud because we just looked into, as you mentioned, user agency, because we still need to use it, and there are all those SaaSes that were just killed or they were unplugged at any given moment in time, and then most of the users just remained looking at the sky without data. Well, they had 30 days, but most of the usual users don't know what to do with it. What should I do if they get it? It's just a blob that is not actually the one they needed. And you can probably see that in the development of Git as well. Because you had Git that promised, 'Okay, you'll not be reliant on the server anymore,' as you were in the SVN or CVS days, and we had Git that was distributed, and then most of the people are using these days GitLab or GitHub, which is a merger of the two worlds. You can have the distributed, you have the data on your machine, you can work even on the plane, but you still have a place where you can just connect with everybody and see those points. Adam Wiggins : Yes, that's well said. And I don't think it has to be either-or exactly like that. Git and GitHub, I think, show that. Olimpiu Pop : Exactly. Adam Wiggins : And obviously, there are other alternatives to GitHub as well that make different trade-offs, but fundamentally, you can have a core thing where when I'm working on a piece of software, I want it on my computer, it's mine, I want to be able to inspect the history. I feel like my hands are tied behind my back if I try to do something, and I don't know, my Wi-Fi is a little unstable, and suddenly, 'Sorry, you can't do that.' It's like, wait a minute, this is my software on my computer, why can't I do it? But it's very reasonable to say, look, when I need to collaborate with my colleagues, going to the cloud, going onto a website in a somewhat centralised place, of course, that makes perfect sense. So again, it's not an either-or, it doesn't have to be a complete rejection of the cloud and, you know, some kind of data anarchy perspective, but there's also a version that I think is kind of where we ended with a lot of cloud things, which is just put everything in the cloud all the time, and that also is too much, and there are some nuanced choices you can make that find a middle ground that gets the best of both worlds. Olimpiu Pop : A lot of the things were just built with proper connectivity because a big bunch of the users were in very good coverage and so on and so forth. But the pandemic period changed the way we do things a bit, and people are moving a lot more; they are working from different parts of the world, and being on the edge is happening more often. And then you can see that a lot of people are factoring that in, and this is one of the things that are becoming cyclical because, if you think about all of them, we went to one extreme, then we came back, and then we found the middle ground. And the question that is going through my head, and I'll just put it up front, even though it wasn't something that I was planning to ask you, is, now we see the same thing happening with agents. How Will The AI Agents' Space Evolve? 22:04 javascript:void 0 ; After we had our autonomy, and we developed on our machine, we had IDEs that are very powerful, a lot of stuff that was happening and you had most of the tools on your machine, and you were able to do it, and then you use the cloud only for syncing purposes, merging a pull request on GitHub or stuff like that. But now, we've got back to the point where I was just discussing a couple of weeks back with one coder, and he was like, 'I was very frustrated during my flight. I had a long flight, and I couldn't work.' 'Well, what stopped you?' 'Well, I didn't have access to Claude.' Adam Wiggins : Yes. Olimpiu Pop : That was quickly done because it's like something that started not long ago, and what I'm wondering is when will you get to that point, that sweet spot, when we are not counting tokens, when we are just getting that proper ID merge where you have smaller agents, smaller LLMs on your machine that are doing 80% of your task and then going back to the cloud only at points? Any thoughts on that? Adam Wiggins : I mean, I think the way you described it is the exact path that should be in store for us in the future, at least if I have my way. And again, there's a very good mirror to the data side of it and something like GitHub, you know. There are places where you need large servers with always-on connectivity, and there are other places where I can just work with local devices. And so I think that small, open-weight models are not only getting more powerful, but we're also just learning how to bring them to bear on these kinds of problems. And obviously there's Local-First Conf, which I'm helping organize and is coming up soon in Berlin, but one of our speakers there is the creator of the pie agent framework, which is a version of this, right, where if you have a harness that allows you to switch more seamlessly between different kinds of models, different kinds of tools, some of which will require internet connectivity, some of which won't. And then being on a plane isn't like you're just completely severed from any ability to use the language model assisted coding that has rapidly become core to many of our workflows, but instead you may have restricted capabilities in the same way that I can't collaborate with my colleagues as well when I'm on the plane, but that's okay, there's stuff I can do. I think there's a version of that ahead for local models, but because the field is still so new, it's just easier to throw everything into the big, expensive GPU compute clusters and kind of send everything to one place. But I very much imagine a more fragmented system, or the ability to choose where I send the work in the future. Olimpiu Pop : Yes, and you can see that now that things are moving quite fast. I mean, we got to the point where you had the Chromebook. Because people were actually using most of the services online. So what was the purpose of having a very powerful machine? Now we're going the other way around: if you look at the top of the line in terms of MacBooks, you do have a very powerful server on your desk, and it's pointless to use only browsers and stuff like that. Well, even though some browsers will not give a name, they still need a server to cache most things locally, so I do understand why that's needed. But also, the GPUs were again an indication of a usage of another type of resourcing in computing because in the end, GPUs were not considered for this kind of load, and then they have all those problems, and some of the parts with the memory of the agents, of LLMs, are part of the way how the GPUs work and were conceived. So now, if you look at it, we are moving towards the TPUs that are closer, it's a refinement of the GPUs and those things will definitely be important into upcoming places, but keeping our discussions into our space, I think it's a continuous evolution and probably the other thing that we have to bear in mind, we did consume a lot of resources with back and forth conversations over the wire that weren't needed. But, I think it's an evolution. And as you mentioned, the Local-First Conference is in its third or fourth edition? The Local First Community is Growing 25:56 javascript:void 0 ; Adam Wiggins : Yes, we're on number three here. The backstory is that we wrote the essay that coined the term local-first in 2019. That was after quite a few years of research by folks in the field, and we wanted to give it a name that had matured enough. But it took a little while before I started to see, I don't want to call them mainstream developers, but let's call them non-academics, people who are building software for use in business and real-world settings. Industry, the academics call it sometimes. And we found that kind of a few years ago, there seemed to be a sudden groundswell of interest, so we held the first edition in 2024, which was a big success and sold out. We realised we needed to expand it, so we doubled the size, had another great edition, both times in Berlin. And yes, now coming up here in mid-July 2026, we're doing the third edition. Um, and I think this one will be the best yet, although it's also such a different time in the industry, so we're also trying to navigate how to address all the massive changes that are happening in software development while also really staying focused on our values and what we believe in and what makes local-first and the related communities unique. Olimpiu Pop : And probably it'll be worth it to see how the conference evolved, and I think it will be quite nice to understand the focus change of the people that are there. I saw, I think, another presentation last year in London where there was a small database based on Git, that's uh, surprising enough, and they tried to do local-first and just saving data as a write-ahead log and stuff like that. So I'm just curious to see how the focus areas have changed over the past three years, and yes, hopefully we'll get a sneak peek of what's to come in mid-July in Berlin. Adam Wiggins : Yes, I think the first year it really was, you know, when Johannes Schickling approached me to basically say, 'Hey, I think we should do this, or we should put on a conference, there would be appetite for it.' The idea was to really see if there was even a kind of community, or whether there were people who could see eye to eye on this, especially because people come from such different backgrounds. There's obviously that academic computer science part of it, which is, you know, they've been the longest players in the space, but then you have more, I'll call it, pragmatically oriented people who say, 'Listen, I'm building my React app, I'd like to give a better experience to my end user, or I'm thinking about privacy and compliance, or maybe even something as just crass as like, hey, I want my cloud hosting bill to be lower. Can this technology help with that?' which is a very reasonable thing. But those people come, you compare that pragmatist and that academic, they come from very different backgrounds. And there's also the research world of Ink & Switch and malleable software and tools for thought, and Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, kind of visionary stuff, which is its own fringy, interesting, unique set of communities, but again has its own values and its own interests. And so that first year putting on the conference, we said, 'Okay, we want to bring these people together. I think it could be interesting to get them in a room together talking to each other, but I'm not sure, maybe they just won't have anything in common or they'll talk past each other.' And indeed, we were actually worried we wouldn't even be able to fill the venue. So we purposely picked a very cool but it was less than 200 people venue in Berlin, sold out in the first week, and I realized we had made quite a mistake because then we were in the position of having to turn away great people because we were at capacity. But yes, really really clicked, was really quite special. You can actually see all the recordings from past years on YouTube if you want to go go look for that. But yes, we had, again, the combination of people like Tuomas Artman, the CTO and founder of Linear, talking about how it is that the local-first sync stuff helps them build their software faster and and make it more fun. But we also had someone like Maggie Appleton coming more from a design perspective talking about how these technologies can help enable what she called barefoot developers, which is sort of fits in the malleable software citizen developer space. So as you can see, it's like it's always been more than I think just CRDTs and sync. That said, especially the second year, I think we really went deep in that. We have a lot of new companies, in many cases venture-funded companies, that are building sync engines, some variation on sync or sync engines or something adjacent to that. So I think last year we went pretty deep on the CRDT technology, on the sync engines and so on, different trade-offs. And that was great, and we see how those companies are getting more mature and their products are more usable. But then going into this year, we thought, okay, we want to we don't want to be just about sync and CRDTs, as interesting as that stuff is and continues to be an evolving space. There's still unsolved problems in that space, and we're still seeing how it plays out in practice. But we wanted to both expand a little bit and the adjacent areas of local-first like identity and authentication is a huge interesting area. But in the meantime, also there's all these changes happening in the industry. So for this year, we kind of put together the combination of our core base of local-first, malleable software, data ownership, and user agency, but we're also bringing in things like you mentioned that AT Proto community, there's some really great energy there, Martin Kleppmann, who was foundational in local-first, also was one of the designers of that protocol, that we also have some things from open source community and some things from kind of privacy, encryption community, and all of these things sort of overlap in an interesting way. And is against this backdrop of this massive shift in how software is built and the role that AI is going to play, and obviously we don't want to be an AI conference and we are not that, but that is going to be a factor in all of this, and so you say, okay, how do we continue to apply our values? We want agency, we want to own our data, we want to own our computing capabilities, but we also want to take advantage of all these great new capabilities that exist. How can we do that? And that is what a lot of the talks are about. Olimpiu Pop : So three years ago, it was just the pilot episode to see what's happening. Did you change the venue in the meantime? Adam Wiggins : We did, we had to. You know, Berlin is such a cool, quirky city in so many ways, and we had we were in an old theater, you look at the pictures there, it was really quite special, but yes, it was also limited what we can do space-wise. So we went to a bigger, you might call it more more professional venue right on the riverside. I'm happy to say this year, we have a venue that's based as part of the Arena complex, which is a riverside nightclub slash event venue thing, very Berlin style, very cool. Yes, I guess it has that creative, quirky, rustic, a little weird vibe that you associate with Berlin, more than you would say London or San Francisco or something like that, while also being a suitable space to hold the almost 400 people we expect to be in attendance this year. Olimpiu Pop : Great. You're an entrepreneur that started his journey in the Valley, probably got to success in the Valley, and now you moved to Berlin for 10 years if I remember correctly or something like that. Adam Wiggins : Yes, more than that, it might be 12 now actually. Olimpiu Pop : How do you feel about Europe? Is it the right place to become creative? Because you have more than a decade here. Adam Wiggins : Yes, that's a complex topic. You know, I was born and raised in California, certainly found my fortune in Silicon Valley and San Francisco, and so my career owes a great debt of gratitude to that place, and I still think that that's a place to go to build your network when you're early on. At the same time, I do think that the problems that software and and internet can solve and also create in some cases are global now, and I think it would be quite limiting if we can only understand those problems and produce software in one place in the world. So once I had some modicum of success there and had built my network, I I wanted to go out and see the world, and Berlin at the time was pretty up-and-coming for startups. Now, I think to some extent, the remote work, again once you do have your network, you can be kind of anywhere, and the world is full of interesting problems to solve that technology and software specifically can help with. For me, it wasn't that calculated, it was that I went out to explore the world when I was in a transitionary time, happened to land in Berlin, work with some great startups there, and just fell in love with the city, and that turned into just settling and eventually having a family here. You know, I don't know if it's the most calculated thing for what's best for my career necessarily. At the same time, I do get exposure to a lot of interesting different ideas. You know, certainly, for example, the German perspective on privacy and privacy laws is very different from the American one, and I wouldn't necessarily say that the cultural mainstream in either of those societies is more right somehow, but more like, I have new perspective because I know both perspectives. And then Europe in general, you know, you ask the question, is it a good place for creativity? I think it is unbelievable as a place to live and for quality of life, and that's why I landed here, why I chose it. You know, the urban lifestyle, the green spaces, riding my bike everywhere, that sort of thing is so, so good for my creative soul for me personally, uh maybe others feel that as well. At the same time, I do think there are a lot of weaknesses in what you can do in terms of starting businesses and the amount of paperwork that's required for that, and the bureaucracy that goes with that, and of course, there are incredible entrepreneurs here who are trying to make a change on that. One of the most interesting initiatives to me is the EU Inc, driven by Andreas Klinger, who's a wonderful Berlin-based investor and entrepreneur who sees the problem of, look, Europe could be a powerhouse, an economic powerhouse and a tech powerhouse the same way as the United States. We know that from all the companies that have been founded here over the years, but at the same time, you do see this migration that when a company gets serious, they either need to go found a US entity and take venture capital or in some cases, the founders move to the United States, and that seems like a really, really big missed opportunity. I think that the zeitgeist is starting to shift on that a little bit in, you know, what it takes to enable entrepreneurs to do what they do, and hopefully have that be in balance with the social safety net and the things that people like about Europe, but yes, I do think that there's on one hand, incredible place to live and inspire your creative soul, and there's many problems to solve and many intelligent entrepreneurs here. On the other hand, for sure, the reputation for bureaucracy and conservativeness and overregulation is deserved, and I think that's starting to be recognized and starting to change. Olimpiu Pop : Yes, on that point, I think you have two examples in mind. One of them is Demis Hassabis, managed to convince Google that he can stay in London and still have an impact on Alphabet, and DeepMind was one of the early pioneers of what all what LLM means, and the flavor that I think it's worth mentioning is the part with ethics. Because he did put a lot of emphasis on making sure that the AI is for good, and that's what he is always still pushing, and he even managed to put a conference on AI ethics in London. And the other point, I think, is you can see steps being taken backwards from the European AI Act. It has a real purpose to just protect people, and there are a lot of things that are important, but I think now they are just taking steps back to make sure that we do have the space for innovation, and that's fortunate, and also I see a lot of push for balance between the social aspects of technology, and that's also quite important from all different perspectives. Well, we leave that for another coffee conversation because it's too heavy. Adam, thank you for your time. We covered a lot of great ground in not so much time, and I really like that. Adam Wiggins : Thanks, it was a pleasure. Olimpiu Pop : And good luck with the conference. Adam Wiggins : Thanks. Yes, looking forward to it. 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