Erica Brescia: the future of Cloud, Wasm, and Open Source
Tags: cloud, opensource, webassembly
Published: 2022-04-02 18:41:28

The [Wasm Builders](https://www.wasm.builders/) community is organizing a series of webinars/livestreams as a way to build and engage with the WebAssembly ecosystem. Our very first guest was Erica Brescia, managing director at [Redpoint Ventures](https://www.redpoint.com/), who shared her thoughts about the future of Cloud, Wasm, and Open Source.

{% embed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03uAyT_UWA0 %}

**Nick Vidal**
Hello, Erica, how are you?

**Erica Brescia**
I'm great. Thanks. How are you?

**NV** 
Yeah, pretty good as well, thank you for joining us! We actually have two communities who are present here today. So one of them comes from the [Confidential Computing Consortium](https://confidentialcomputing.io/), from the [Linux Foundation](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/), and the other one is [Wasm Builders](https://www.wasm.builders/), which is a very new community around WebAssembly. So these are two very new communities. And it's such a pleasure to have you here joining us in this conversation, to learn more about your experience, and anything you can share with us will be very valuable. So thank you so much for this.

**EB**
Of course, thanks for the opportunity, excited to be here. And hopefully, lots of friends in the audience. It's some small communities of really great folks. So delighted to be here.

**NV**
Wonderful. So let me introduce you formally. So [Erica Brescia](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebrescia) is the managing director at [Redpoint Ventures](https://www.redpoint.com/). She's the former COO of [GitHub](https://github.com), and she was also the co-founder of [Bitnami](https://bitnami.com). So let me start off with the first question, probably everybody starts with this question: so, what's open source to you? How did you get started? And why do you feel open source is important?

**EB**
Sure. I mean, you know, I think there's so many different ways to think about open source, right? Like, at its core, it really is a licensing model. But more important to me is really a collaboration model. And then an understanding about how a community of people is going to come together and work. And, you know, especially during my time at GitHub, I talked a lot about how open source is really an interconnected and interdependent set of communities, which I think makes it just a very cool and unique ecosystem to be a part of. I've given some talks in the past where I talked about, like, this one commit in a [TensorFlow](https://www.tensorflow.org) project ended up having an impact on, you know, 1000s of projects that all depend on TensorFlow. And, in turn, influences developers that are building on all of these other projects. And so, to me, it's a vibrant, and really texturally rich fabric of people coming together to build really cool things that really do truly change the world that we live in today, right? Open source and everything, everything we touch, you know, our cars, to medical devices, to our phones. And yeah, it's really remarkable how far the community has come. And I feel really fortunate to get to be a really small part of it.

**NV** 
Big part of it! You did mention commits and code. But there's so much more to open source than just the open source code, the source code. So oftentimes, people believe that you must have a very strong technical background, like you mentioned, like a hacker working around computers all the time. But how was your experience around this? And what advice would you give to people who feel that they want to contribute to open source, want to learn about open source, but sometimes have this imposter’s syndrome? They don’t look like a hacker, sometimes they don’t know much about programming, and they're just learning. What advice would you give to those people?

**EB** 
Whoa, wow, I could talk about this for a long time. So maybe I'll share a little bit of my own personal history. And for those who don't know me, I am not an engineer. Sadly, I've never been a developer. I actually studied Investment Finance in college. And I found open source in 2004, actually Wired published an article on [Linus Torvalds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds), and [Linux](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel) and kind of the rise of Linux. And I found it absolutely fascinating. And I was talking to a friend in San Francisco about it, who introduced me to a guy named [Daniel Lopez](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ridruejo), who became my co-founder. And Daniel was a very early member of the [Apache Software community](https://www.apache.org/). He worked on [Mono](https://www.mono-project.com/) for those of you who remember it, and, you know, he was like this brilliant technical guy who obviously really understood open source and what was happening and how to build, and he didn't have an operational or sales background or like, hadn't built big teams before anything like that. And I had, and so he kind of invited me to start working with him, really, and I started by doing a few things. I remember I went and read all the open source licenses. And I was like taking notes for myself to understand how [Apache](https://opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0) compared to [MIT](https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT) compared to [GPL](https://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-license). All these things just to try to understand the mechanics of that. And then, like, I just went on lots of forums and things to learn what people were talking about. This is kind of the days of the [LAMP stack](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)). But this all makes me feel so old. It goes back a long time.

**NV**
But it's my time as well, no worries!

**EB**
Yeah, there you go! We can be old together. So yeah, I just started going to like LAMP stack meetups and things like that in San Francisco. And, you know, we went on, for those of you who don't know, we started a company called [Bitrock](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitnami), and then we started Bitnami. And our goal really, and we discovered this while at Bitrock, and it kind of gave birth to Bitnami, was to make it easier for people to actually use open source software, like we realize that, at the time, you didn't have packaged open source software, it was just like, code, right? And you had to be able to deploy everything yourself. And, back in those days, kind of [MySQL](https://www.mysql.com/) and [Jaspersoft](https://www.jaspersoft.com/) and [Pentaho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentaho), and all of these companies were getting started that we're building on open source, but like, the people who might want to use [SugarCRM](https://www.sugarcrm.com/) software weren't developers, they didn't have a way to install it. And so what we did was, we packaged up, you know, built installers, this was before VMs, or containers, and cloud images and everything. We built installers that made it really easy for people to set up a LAMP development environment on their, on their laptop, right. And what we saw was, you know, even developers who could set up everything themselves didn't really want to, and these installers got really popular. And so, you know, I mentioned that story, because I think it's interesting to think about, like different ways that you can contribute, right, the way that I ended up contributing was supporting a company and building a team that was doing the work to bring open source to people. Because I contributed in the ways that I did to build the company, we got to hire a ton of developers and build really cool things, a lot of which were done in open source, and also make open source more accessible. And what I found was like, the community, and it's hard to say the community, right, because there's not one open source community, there's a ton of open source communities, and they all have different cultures and values and things like that. But at least in the places where I got involved in the meetups I went to in the early like [OSCON](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Reilly_Open_Source_Convention), and the early open source conferences, like, I really never felt judged for not being a developer, I found people to be really welcoming and patient with like, me trying to understand, you know, what a reverse proxy is, or whatever it was back in the day. And like, Yeah, I think, you know, to answer your question about how to get started, like, there's so many things you can do from being helpful in support forums on, you know, GitHub or on places like [Stack Overflow](https://stackoverflow.com/), to contributing to documentation. Like, I think docs teams don't get enough love and support and having great Docs is one of the most important things that an open source project needs to thrive. And you don't always have to be technical to write the Docs. Right? You can help run events. I think you can, you know, interview interesting people who aren't developers, like, there's so many different ways that you can get involved in, I think, you know, to folks who maybe have a little imposter’s syndrome, it's like, honestly, what do you really have to lose? Like, people are genuinely, generally pretty nice. Like, just, you know, pick up a pen and do something and ask questions, ask thoughtful questions, right, like, try to do your homework first. But um, yeah, there's really nothing ultimately, I think to be afraid of.

**NV**  
Yeah, I think that's the perfect answer. Open source is all about collaboration, right? And it's not just code. You can help in any way possible. So yeah, that's really great. So you were part of the early days of cloud computing. And Bitnami played a role - a very important role - in helping users to, as you said, to make it accessible, to make it easy to deploy applications to the Cloud. But since then, the cloud has evolved. The cloud is constantly evolving, getting more complex. People are trying to understand it. How do you see the cloud evolving? How can we make it more accessible? What trends do you see in this regard?

**EB**  
Yeah, that's a great question. Right? Like, I remember when people were complaining about the complexity of the [AWS console](https://aws.amazon.com/console/). And now like, there's so many bigger problems than that, you know, especially with the rise of like containers and Kubernetes, it let us do a lot more interesting things, and serverless, and all these, you know, new ways of building and deploying software. But it also just brought unbelievable complexity to, like developer’s development pipelines. And I think it's definitely the case that DevOps teams in particular are just under like, unprecedented and unbelievable workload, right? Whether you're, like working in a company or trying to do something to support an open source project. And it's just a lot, right. And there's like, never enough people. And I know hiring DevOps engineers is the number one recruiting problem of companies, tech companies today, if there's some actual report that shares the numbers on that, but like, there just aren't enough people that know how to do this. And the ones that know, are totally overwhelmed. And so what I see in terms of trends, and I've actually, we just announced one of my investments earlier this week, [Dagger](https://dagger.io/), but you'll see this trend, I think, like really, really accelerating is platforms that simplify the complexity, right, and just make life easier for people who are trying to deploy to the cloud. You know, another investment I did after joining Redpoint is called [Xata](https://xata.io/). And it's kind of like [Airtable](https://www.airtable.com/) meets a real data layer, for folks to build these super powerful apps. But without having to do all the operational stuff. There's another investment I've made that hasn't been announced yet that is also like, again, bringing a platform to developers, it makes it considerably easier to like deploy and manage apps in the cloud. And then you have some really cool projects like Dagger, which I think is doing really interesting things to make it easier to manage things that you're deploying. So I think that trend will continue. And I think there's some really significant businesses to be built in that space that just, like, abstract away a lot of this complexity, because it doesn't really add value, right? It's like you have to do it to have a highly performant globally scalable web app. But like, you know, people right now are reinventing the wheel every single time they're building these pipelines. And then it's like, you know, you don't have real developer tools like CI/CD pipelines, like you do for building software. And the time has come for that to change. So I mean, clearly, I'm biased, right? I've invested significant amounts of money into some of these technologies. And I'm looking at a lot of others, but I'm, you know, I'm putting my money where my mouth is too, as another way of looking at it. Like, I think this is a big problem that we as an ecosystem need to solve, because there just aren't enough people to do the work. And it's not making the best use of some people's talents today. So yeah.

**NV** 
Yeah. It seems like a common theme in your life, trying to make the Cloud more accessible, right? So there's also something emerging, as I mentioned, [WebAssembly](https://webassembly.org/): is that on your radar? I know the technology is very new, the community is still small, but many consider it to be the third wave of cloud computing. We had virtual machine, that was the first wave. We had containers, the second wave. And how do you feel about this?

**EB**
Yeah, it's early days, but it's not that early days, right? I mean, Wasm came out, like, I don't know, a few years ago, it does feel like the community is starting to gain momentum. It is absolutely on my radar. And, you know, I'm interested in meeting everybody building in this space. And like, there's lots of cool stuff, our friends at [Fermyon](https://www.fermyon.com/) or [Suborbital](https://suborbital.dev/) or [Second State](https://www.secondstate.io/) or [Profian](https://www.profian.com/), right? Like, yeah, there's a lot of really interesting things being built. And I think, and again, I'm not an engineer, I'm not going to go super deep into the merits of Wasm, but I'll say a few things. First, you know, everybody's eyes are on Security right now. And just because of WebAssembly, like inherent isolation and security properties, I think there are a lot of interesting applications there. And I think, you know, that's some of what, Connor is working on at Suborbital and I know, like [Shopify](https://www.shopify.com/) has done a bunch of cool work to let you build, like, make Shopify kind of more extensible for their customers. I think the other big thing is this trend of apps moving to the edge, right? It's like edge and IoT, when you look at companies like [Netlify](https://www.netlify.com/), and [Vercel](https://vercel.com/), and what they're doing to make it easier, and how apps are like shifting data right out to the edge, I think Wasm is just so much more performant and efficient. And then, you know, even compared to containers, right? And so I think there's going to be a lot of interesting things that are built that take advantage of the inherent, like performance capabilities of Wasm. And then there's the third piece, which is just this kind of ability to translate and move different apps written in different languages, right? And I know, like for Confidential Computing, for example, for what you guys are working on at Profian, there's some really interesting applications there, too. So yeah, I think it's pretty obvious it is very much on my radar, it was one of my core areas of exploration and coming into Redpoint was trying to understand what's happening in the ecosystem. You know, to your point about timing, it does still feel like we're several years away from like, really mainstream adoption. And I think there's a lot of work that needs to be done to just add better language support to Wasm. Like, my understanding is right now, you really have to understand a lot about how Wasm works and like, build with that in mind to have it work really well. And I think, you know, longer term that needs to go away. But look, I mean, that's always the case, in the early days of a new technology. And I have been telling folks, it kind of feels like the early days of [Kubernetes](https://kubernetes.io/). To me, you know, there's some really smart people working on very cool things. And there's a lot of energy and momentum. And I'm firmly of the belief that it's going to change the way that software is built. And there's going to be some really big companies built as well, I'm still figuring out which ones those will be.

**NV** 
We always say that about not just WebAssembly, but also [Confidential Computing](https://confidentialcomputing.io/faq/), that we’re like Kubernetes, five years ago. And yeah, maybe one year from now this is going to explode. Hopefully, so. So, yeah, we have, as you mentioned, a few companies, a few startups in the WebAssembly world, and they're emerging. Oftentimes these startups, they act as a custodian to an open source project and community. My question is, what recommendation would you have around growing a healthy open source project and community while building a business model around this?

**EB**
Yeah, that's a great question. And I think we as an industry have learned so much since the first wave of open source companies, right? And so I'd say a few things. And you should talk to [Jono](https://www.jonobacon.com/) about this. At some point, he has, obviously, been playing around communities. But I think the first thing is to be really clear from the beginning, when you're building a company, like what is going to be built in open source and what isn't? And then what are your goals? Like, why are you doing this and open source? Right? And you, in my opinion, like, you have to want to have open source as part of your overall strategy, product strategy, for the right reasons or it's gonna fall flat. And the right reasons to me are really wanting to build and engage with a vibrant community around your project, right? Just slapping code out on the internet under an open source license, like in a GitHub repo to me is like, maybe it meets the letter of open source, but it's certainly not the spirit of it. And so I think being really clear in your own mind about what what you're building and why and what your expectations are from the open source community and like, understanding how much investment it's going to take to do it well, because, you know, open source is not like Free in terms of an energy perspective, right? So they say it's like free as in a free puppy. Like, it comes with a lot of work and commitment, and you need to be ready to back that up. And I think a lot of companies in the early days sometimes underestimated what it really took, like you need to hire people, to engage with the community and to build with the community and to, you know, bring folks together. And it's significant. And I think the other thing that's really important is transparency from the very beginning with the community around what you are building and how it relates to the business that you might be building, right? Like, that's where you get a lot of community heartache, and quite frankly, rightly so if people are like contributing to a project, and then you kind of change the licensing or you do something unexpected with that project, where people feel like you're breaking the covenant that you have. And you, you lose, and it's just not good karma either. Yeah, it's like the wrong thing to do. And so I think, you know, going out from the beginning, and you know, I'm talking about [Dagger](https://dagger.io/), because they announced this week, but like, a big part of Dagger is open source. And like, if you go through the [Hacker News](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30857012) thread, like, [Solomon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/solomonhykes/) is super clear on like, this is what we're gonna do with this. And there's gonna be this other thing that is commercial, and proprietary, but not this part, like this part is always going to be open. And we're going to build with the community. And like, that's where we're drawing the line. I think that's how you do it.

**NV** 
Erica, you're very spot on. I've worked with the [Open Source Initiative](https://opensource.org/), I helped them to celebrate the 20 years of open source, and hearing your comments, I just had to laugh, because this is exactly what happens. Companies changing their licenses every now and then, and just throwing the community under the bus. So really being clear, being transparent, since the beginning, avoiding changing licenses of your code all the time. This is very much spot on. So that was the perfect answer.

**EB**
Yeah, I mean, I'm probably preaching to the choir with this audience. I think I don't know if people are learning a lot from that part. Because I think everybody who is really an open source inherently knows it. But yeah, it's unbelievable to me how people still kind of screw it up. It's like, it's not that hard, like, tell people what you're gonna do. And do it. Like, those are the two things, you know, like, yeah.

**NV**
You're actually going to be surprised of what people think is open source: there are all kinds of opinions. So yeah, but you were spot on. So let's change the subject a bit. We have many talented people from around the world. And you saw that, especially working at GitHub, we have underrepresented groups, who lack the visibility, the connections, and opportunities to grow their careers. So what was your experience addressing that challenge? And how do you see this evolving?

**EB**  
Yeah, um, it's certainly not a solved problem yet. And this is something I spent a lot of time on this actually at GitHub. And also, I think we didn't mention this, but I'm on the board of the Linux Foundation (LF). And I have been for the last five and a half years. So I both work with the LF and with GitHub on diversity in open source. And, you know, there's this keynote I was giving for a while, it was called the [next 50 million developers](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=poENiMjjG2U), right? And one of the things that I was talking about is where the next wave of developers are going to come from, and it's really, you know, Latin America, Africa, and China. And I don't think we do a good enough job today in bringing people from like different countries and socio economic backgrounds and situations into open source and really building a paved path. And then, you know, even I'm coming to you from the US, right, and in the US, and just building pathways from people from underrepresented backgrounds who might not have the same exposure to tech and open source into the community. And we launched this program called [All In](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwbrgUGlqH4) - it's the brainchild of a woman named [Demetris](https://www.linkedin.com/in/dwcheatham), who is very passionate about this. She was at [Red Hat](https://www.redhat.com/) before GitHub, and we just ran a pilot so it was small, but it was with 24 students. We taught them open source curriculum via their universities and then lined them up with internships and then placed them with companies. And so that was one side of it like starting to figure out how to build a better paved path into open source. And then the flip side of that, which I think is super interesting and still in its early days, is how do we help open source projects learn how to be more inviting and inclusive in the way that they work. And, and that was something Demetris is working on at All In, she did something called the maintainers listening tour, and published the results of that a few months ago, I think. And then she also partnered with the Linux Foundation to run a [survey on diversity and open source](https://www.linuxfoundation.org/tools/the-2021-linux-foundation-report-on-diversity-equity-and-inclusion-in-open-source/) just to get a baseline and start building an understanding of where we are, and where we need to improve. And that, again, the results were all published. And I think it's really interesting data, right? And it shows rather, unsurprisingly, that we have a lot of work to do. And, you know, from a project perspective, since we probably have a lot of open source contributors on the stream, I mean, there's some of the basic things like making sure you have a good code of conduct, and there are plenty of good templates that are, you know, Creative Commons or otherwise, you know, openly available for that, but then it's like, making it really clear about how people can start contributing, and like, what kind of good behavior looks like, because sometimes, you know, look, open source maintainers, just like DevOps engineers are, like, so overwhelmed in these big projects, you know, there's just so much to do, a lot of people are doing this, in addition to a day job, and, you know, it's just constant, like, you know, issues being filed and things happening in the community. And then like, you get a newbie who comes and tries to, you know, merge a PR, whatever that like is not up to snuff. And like, sometimes those exchanges around people trying to contribute for the first time can really turn them off of open source. And so I think, yeah, you know, All In is looking at, like, how do we define a set of tools, and maybe even build a team that can go in and support open source projects, because the maintainers don't always have time to do this, to just like, put things in place to make it easier for people to start contributing in a productive way that helps them learn, but also doesn't overly burden the project maintainers, who don't necessarily always have time to kind of bring people along and do a lot of hand holding. So I'm really eager to see... I know GitHub still is deeply passionate about, you know, solving this, this problem in open source, and the LF is as well. And I'm really kind of eager to see what this next generation of investment looks like around this. Because, you know, I think there's a lot of great people trying to work on this. But what I saw when we started working on All In was that everything was very fragmented. And there wasn't really like a handoff from one part of your journey and to open source to the other. So that's what All In is trying to tap into things that are already there, not rebuild everything, but pull together content, and you know, best practices and things like that from different sources and provide something that's really holistic for both projects. And for, you know, hopefully, new recruits, if you will, into open source to contribute. And I think, you know, there's smart and passionate people working on this, and I really hope to see a lot of great progress out of them. Because there's just so much talent out there too. And like, yeah, it's a problem. But it's such a cool opportunity, right? You have people from backgrounds who, as part of getting into open source, can literally change their lives and their livelihoods. And then sometimes even their local economy as a result. Technology and open source can bring a lot of financial prosperity into developing countries, I think. Open source needs more amazing contributors, and there's so much talent around the world. It's just a question of building the connectors. I think, and I'm really hopeful that the work that's being done is going to materially change things over the next five years.

**NV**  
Yeah, that's also spot on. And I'm going to do a call to action for the startups that are watching now: get a community manager to do exactly that kind of bridge, as you said, between the maintainers and the new, the newbies, the folks learning about open source. So the community managers can help onboard those new people and help the maintainers as well. So going into the next question, we also see many women entrepreneurs are facing this challenge. I know that you worked with [xfactor ventures](https://www.xfactor.ventures/), how have you contributed to address this? And also at Redpoint, are you addressing this as well?

**EB** 
Yeah, I think this is a great question. So, um, a few answers. So for those of you who don't know, xfactor is a small seed fund. And what's pretty cool about it is, it's all operating female founders who are investing in companies founded by women, or at least with a woman or somebody who identifies with a woman, we use that term very broadly, like, if you tell us, you're a woman, then that counts. And I think it's really unique in that all of the people doing the investing have been there and done that and scaled. A lot of the team has really scaled their companies, you know, through an IPO and can just be great mentors and advisors to women who are building companies. I'm not investing out of xfactor anymore, of course, because I’m at Redpoint. But that also was a bridge for me into deciding to move full time into venture capital. And what's pretty cool is, I'm the fourth woman associated with xfactor to move into venture full time, which is pretty cool. And like, I mean, huge kudos to that firm. And I actually invested in Xata, that company that I mentioned earlier. It has a woman founder, and I invested in her seed at xfactor. And then I led the A (series) at Redpoint, which is an all female board of a database company, which is pretty rad. And so, you know, through xfactor, certainly, I invested in a lot of women founders. And one thing that's pretty cool at Redpoint, on our early stage team, like, we are about 50/50, women and men. And you know, as our team continues to grow and evolve, I expect that that shift is actually going to change even more, which is awesome, we've got a really diverse team and a lot of people who are immigrants to the US on the team, too, which is neat. And so, you know, one thing that we noticed in going through our portfolio is a lot of our really stellar founders are women. And we don't have stats, because we don't ask founders about, you know, their gender identity when we invest in them. I think that's not the point or how we think about investing. But um, but I will call out amazing women entrepreneurs, the CEO of [Guild](https://www.guildeducation.com/), which is doing spectacularly well, the CEO of [LaunchDarkly](https://launchdarkly.com/), [Edith](https://www.linkedin.com/in/edithharbaugh), as some of you may know, they're absolutely kicking ass, and then there's [Idit](https://www.linkedin.com/in/iditlevine) too, over at [Solo](https://www.solo.io/). And now, of course, [Monica](https://www.linkedin.com/in/monicasarbu) at Xata, and I left out the CEO of Guild. [Rachel](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelrcarlson), I didn't say her name earlier. But um, yeah, there are a lot of amazing women that we're backing and you know, ultimately, we're looking to back the best companies and a lot of them are headed by women, and they're doing spectacularly well. And so when I think about how I can contribute, I do a few things. And, you know, obviously, I try to meet as many women founders as possible and consider their companies for investment. Another thing that I'm doing is spending time with other women investors, and just kind of building out that network and sharing deals, and I'm working with some folks who are very much earlier in their investor journey, and helping them. In fact, one of them who's in the Wasm community reached out the other day and said, like, Hey, can we get on a call with this other woman who's also deep in open source to have a chat about their angel investing and just how they're thinking about investing? So and, you know, I think part of being a woman, a woman in tech, and this is something I didn't appreciate until recently is just to be out there and talk about what we're doing and like, let people see that we're here. And we all have our own stories. And, you know, just like all people, I think, have our own set of challenges. But, you know, there's certainly nothing that should be holding you back based on your gender, in particular in open source or startups, right?

**NV** 
For sure. Yeah, great. And now something related as well. We know that COVID has had a major impact, especially for women who have to take care of kids. And also how technology played a role here. As a mother and someone in a leadership role in large companies like GitHub or Repoint, you must have seen all types of experiences. What was your impression about the role of technology in this regard? The good and the bad? And all the challenges related?

**EB**
Oh, boy. Um, so, I mean, look, I'm definitely a technology optimist, and when, and I'm also just an optimist in general, and COVID was horrific, but I think it actually drove some pretty good societal changes that are going to persist. And I try to focus as much as I can on how to take advantage of the positive. And, you know, I think one really positive thing about tackling COVID was, it just made remote work easier, or distributed work, you know. The word, the term remote can be polarizing for some, but like it made distributed work and working from home or working from wherever really much more normalized, and it drove even, like, historically very conservative companies to switch to, you know, distributed remote work. And I think a lot of them saw a lot of benefits from that. And part of working from home in general is having some more flexibility around scheduling and how you spend your time. Now, of course, you know, there are meetings, and you still need to talk to people live. And I'm still a big fan of getting together in person. And I've been working hybrid or remote for 15 years. So like way before the pandemic. And I still like going into an office some of the time. I find I get a lot of value out of the conversations that just happen when you're face to face. And I don't think anybody has really solved that, right? I've been using Slack heavily for years and Discord with other people. And I'm on every single communication platform, I think, that exists today. But there's still nothing like going to get a glass of water and bumping into somebody and having a conversation, right. And I think that what we're starting to see is companies learning to embrace giving people a lot more flexibility around how they work. Now, of course, this is not true for everybody, right? Like, if you're not working in a kind of a job where you're relying on tech or in the tech world, it can be more challenging. And, you know, you see maybe like, financial folks can work from home, but not somebody working in a grocery store. And you know, I'm not sure we're going to be able to change that anytime soon. But I have seen it made companies a lot more empathetic to the needs of you know, not just working parents, but people who have any kind of dependents in their home situation, it could be, you know, elderly parents or something like that, too. It's not always children, or that, you know, a spouse with a medical condition or something. And I think people are learning better to work with that, and set some kind of core working hours as opposed to like, expecting people to like being in office nine to five. And I think that's a really positive development. And I also, I mean, certainly at GitHub, we already had very flexible leave policies, but we put a lot of other things in place to allow people to take time away from work if they needed to. And then I'd say one other thing, like the New York Times, actually published an article on this a while ago, I think, is the New York Times or maybe the journal, but it was about how even executives are stepping back. Like I think, you know, people have started to better understand burnout and just the need to take time away. And  something that I think is actually quite significant is, if you go on LinkedIn now there is an option to add time away from work on your profile. But that's like a really big comment on where we are as a society. Now when it comes to work, right? It is now totally acceptable to say, if you can afford it, which not everybody has, of course, the luxury of doing but people are saying like, Hey, I'm taking six months off work, I'm taking a year off of work. And my hope is that it's actually going to make it a lot easier for people to take time away for anything. It could be for childbearing or rearing and that could be for a woman or for man, right, or anybody anywhere on the gender spectrum. Like I'm hoping that's going to be normalized and so that it's not so hard to take time away from work and come back into the workforce. And my other hope is that, again, that applies to a wide variety of circumstances. And hopefully it will make it easier for people from underrepresented backgrounds in tech as well to make job changes, it feels like just work is more fluid and careers are more fluid than they used to be. And that that's understood and accepted in a way that hasn't been before. And I do think COVID played a very significant role in that.

**NV**  
Yeah, wonderful. Oh, you did mention meeting people. And we know that some tech conferences are going to be in person again. What are some conferences that you're looking forward to attending? Perhaps this year?

**EB**  
The only one that I have on the docket? So far? Is the [Open Source Summit in Austin](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/open-source-summit-north-america/)? I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to that. I think that's gonna feel like a giant... Yeah, it's for everybody. I mean, I always love those events. They're very feel good. And I have a Linux, a LF board meeting there, too. I'm really excited for that. I want to go to [KubeCon](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/kubecon-cloudnativecon-europe/), but I don't think I'm going to be able to make it. I'm like really desperate to go back to Spain and see some of the Bitnami folks. Yeah, but also just see lots of friendly faces. But yeah, those are the only two so far. I'm also going to be in Miami for [Tech Week](https://www.miamitechweek.io/) in a few weeks and meeting a bunch of folks. But there's a lot of events. I don't know if I can call that a conference. But I'm looking forward to that. It's definitely nice to get out and see people again, for sure. We hosted a little happy hour last night. Redpoint did and I went and it was so nice. And we stayed until we got kicked out. It was the end of like eight and I think we left at nine and it was I think everybody was just excited to be together. And personally, I don't know, what should I be going to? I should turn that question around. When is [Wasm Day](https://events.linuxfoundation.org/cloud-native-wasm-day-europe/) coming up?

**NV**
Yeah, thank goodness, you woke up for this interview. Otherwise, I wouldn't know what to say. Yeah, so actually, well, Wasm day is happening at KubeCon, co-located with Kubecon, and it’s going to be in Spain two months from now. We're going to be there, of course, to promote WebAssembly and getting together with the community. What's so interesting is that we have many people who have worked together, who have joined those startups, those companies, and they've never met before. So this will be the first time that we'll be meeting. So it's really interesting.

**EB**
Maybe you might have just tipped me over this scale on going to KubeCon.

**NV**  
Oh, great. Wow. So Erica, it was a really great pleasure talking to you. I'm not sure if we have time for questions, as we're way past the time. But it was a great, great pleasure talking with you. Hopefully, we'll meet, if not at KubeCon, perhaps another conference in person. And thank you so much for all your insights. And we look forward to building the Wasm ecosystem together with you. And not just the Wasm ecosystem, the whole open source ecosystem. So thank you so much for all your suggestions, and recommendations.

**EB**
Thank you. Thanks. This was fun. I hope folks who are listening found it useful. If you want to reach out and talk to me, I'm pretty easy to find on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/ericabrescia), because my last name is odd. And also on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/ebrescia). And please reach out. I'd love to continue the conversation. This feels like the start of a conversation, really. And I'd love to chat and if I do end up going to Kubecon I'll put it on Twitter and see who I can catch up with there. But thanks for having me. Thanks for all the work you're all doing building very cool things. It's really exciting to watch all these new developments and see what's coming from all the folks like I've known for a long time. We're working on cool new stuff. So I'm delighted to be here. Thank you and until next time.

**NV** 
Yeah, until! Thank you Erica. Bye bye!

[Cross-posted to Profian's Blog](https://blog.profian.com/erica-brescia-the-future-of-cloud-wasm-and-open-source/).