Tanner Linsley built TanStack to outlive him

How can I take something and build it in a way that's going to keep going when I'm gone? For builders, founders, and entrepreneurs, it feels like everyone wants to tell you how to run your company. And if you ignore their advice, well, you're not going to make it. Most of that advice, though, is hypothetical. Wouldn't it be more valuable to hear what someone actually did? I'm Jason Lengstorf, and I'm in Miami to hear real stories about real companies from the people who built them. This is The Build Log. I'm at La Trova to talk to Tanner Linsley. He is a legendary open source creator, and I want to hear how he built TanStack. It seems like a lot is new. Yeah, there's a lot going on. It is really wild to think back to when it was like TanStack Table and React Query. Actually, the first library that I did that really got out there was React Table, which comes as a surprise to some people. Right, yeah. I mean, I remember using it. It solved a very specific problem that a lot of people had. So was it in your head that this was a possible future? Oh, no, not at all. And so that has now snowballed to where you stopped focusing on React. React Query is now TanStack Query. And if I'm understanding correctly, you're even to the point now where there's stuff in the TanStack suite that you have not actually contributed to outside of putting it into the TanStack suite. Correct. How does that feel? It's pretty weird. It's grown into something that is too big for just me. I mean, that's great. I wanted that. Was there like a specific point where you were like, this is the direction I want to go? Or was it more of a kind of like slow evolution? React Table really tempted me to go into open source deeper because it was the first library that I was dealing with a problem that a lot of people experienced. And that high of just people being like, thank you for building this, man, it came in clutch. I was like, Oh, I like that. You know? So regardless of if it was successful or not, that was the first library that I built on my own. The moment that I knew it was going to be something even bigger was when React Query ran away from me. Like it got on a flywheel during the pandemic. I did a handful of talks about it at conferences. And I swear I went, you know, away for a week on vacation or something and came back and it was just like, everybody was using it. I was like, what is happening? It was like this, this incredible experience of seeing something that when I use it, I was like, this really solves the problem. That's sort of been a thing that I've noticed about your career is that a lot of times you choose different trade-offs. Like when, when everybody else was saying, well, we want to ship this and we want it to be out there. You were like, I'm not shipping router yet because it's not the type safety is not there yet. Do you think there is a specific thing happening in your approach to work or your general outlook that like edges toward that, like go way above and beyond on, on completeness or is there something else at play? My personal approach to software is actually not to perfect everything. I've always just kind of anchored around pragmatism. When I was building all this stuff at Nozzle, I wasn't, I wasn't building it with the intention of it's gotta be perfect before I release it. It was more like it needed to solve an immediate like pain I was having. And as soon as it solved my pain in a way that I could move on to the next thing at Nozzle, I was like, okay, here you go world. To be pragmatic, there are trade-offs of saying like, there's, there's far enough, there's too far, there's not far enough. Yeah. What was informing that decision that, that maybe you think was different from what other people were looking at and saying like, it's not important enough. It's too much of a trade-off. When I was at Nozzle, I was the only front end developer and building something to that scale on your own is impossible without having tooling to help you. And so I was literally dealing just with the insanity of trying to manage all this stuff in my head. I needed to take it to the point where not just me or, or, or employees coming in and also if, if I was going to ever hire more front end people that they could step into the role and they wouldn't have to just learn everything. So that, that pragmatism isn't just about the here and the now while I'm typing on the computer. It was like the pragmatism of scalability. How, how can I take something and, and build it in a way that's going to keep going when I'm gone. You were almost building not because you, you thought you needed to hit some arbitrary level of completeness, but you were almost building against your own perceived weaknesses. Yeah. Do you carry that level of like almost kind of like defensive feature building? Is that something that you're kind of carrying across other areas of your life? I like to prepare for the future. I am a very defensive programmer. I'm a defensive businessman. I just like to be prepared for random things. Was there a particularly hard lesson that kind of made that click for you or that drove that home as like, this is the right way for me to move forward? Or is that just a natural tendency? In my years during college, I suffer from anxiety and a little bit of depression. And some of that was I lost my dad at a young age, but it gave me some perspective. And you could probably say I carried a lot of that into the way that I work. I think you could look at some of the software that's come out of TanStack and a lot of it is kind of based around what can we build that will not just help people get through a rough time with building something, but what could we build that would actually just let them to never have to feel that pain again? I mean, that's really valuable. Are there active things that you've been doing or specific ways that you think about community that you think have led to TanStack being such a healthy community? And also, I guess the contributors being your team, like a healthy, a really healthy and productive team. You build something, it's your baby. Yeah. And then the idea of saying, okay, I'm going to let somebody in on this. That can be really scary. But I'll be honest, it never has been scary for me, bringing in any of my maintainers. And I think that that doesn't say much about me personally. I think it says more about them and who they are. They just kind of naturally presented themselves as an asset and put in the work and the time. And before I knew it, they knew everything better than I did. And then one day I'm like, hey, by the way, you hold the reins now. Anything specific to cultivate? I'm good at some things, but it doesn't mean I enjoy doing them. And when I see somebody that's good at doing something that I don't like to do, I will happily hand them the control to do that. Giving those opportunities to grow into the role I think are important. And it's that turning point of trust where it's like, okay, you are clearly capable of making better decisions now for the future of this thing than I am. I'm not a late stage person. I love the first 80, 90%. Yeah. And the last 10%, I just want to crawl in a hole and die. It's hard to say, yeah, you know what? You're right. You know better about how to raise my baby than I do. And that can be hard. I think the thing that I've always kind of found impressive is that in an industry that is just absolutely sodden with this idea of you've got to push hard, you got to be hyperbolic, you've got to have some hype cycles around it, you promise things that you'll deliver next quarter. Like it's always about the next fundraising round or the next big conference or whatever it is. You do things in a way and like the whole community does things in a way that feels are less ego driven. How are you kind of balancing that visibility versus like not overhyping? Having visibility into something you've built is great. It's a wonderful feeling makes me feel successful telling the world that it's just as much about them. To be honest, it's been 10 years working on Nozzle, even through a decade of, are we going to raise money and we can't pay ourselves this this month or the next month or the next month, you know, like, right, there were points in time where we went entire stretches of a year or almost two without giving ourselves anything. And it was hard. It's definitely hard, right? But at no point in time was I ever like, man, we don't have enough. I think that there's a lot to say about just being content with what you have. And I and that might be one of the vehicles that allows you to share. Yeah. Because if you're never content, why would you ever share? Right. I actually I love that. One of the things that you mentioned is that like you, you have your faith. And that as part of that, you ended up doing a mission for two years, right? How much of that do you think just directly contributed to to your ability to succeed in what you do? It changes you, it definitely changes you. And it doesn't have to be in a third world country or a different language. The resilience is definitely strengthened. Like it's really, really good at some point in your life to work in service. And whether that's working retail in a like waiting tables, whatever it is, but being in a position where you're not in control. Yeah. And you learn all these things where it's just like, I gotta be really vulnerable here and just go to somebody and say, like, hi, you don't know me, but I'd love to talk to you about this cool thing that I'm working on. And I hope that you'll help. You're in a leadership position of mostly volunteers, which means that you're sort of in a position where you're like in charge with no authority. Yeah. Right. Again, talking about the TanStack community, it's one that seems to function extremely well on a completely volunteer basis. A lot of the TanStack team is able to get some compensation. A vast majority of the TanStack maintainers are sponsored by TanStack. And it's hard because these people don't work for TanStack. Their, their time that they have and that they're willing to donate to TanStack is variable. How are you shaping community? How are you like structuring things? I'm trying my best to set a good example. And I'm trying to stay that way. Obviously, even today, I'm, I'm not the best example all the time of how to do things. And I have my own maintainers and community being like, Tanner, you shouldn't, we shouldn't do that. That's it. That's like against our tenets. There are some things about like the software to like the technical things that we laid out. These are kind of the tenets that we live by for, for building software. And we wrote those down. We put them on the website. And, and we put that there kind of as like a guard against bad actors and a guard against, you know, the things that might try and steer in the wrong direction. But also as like a beacon of like, if you care about these things too, you will be at home here. So yeah, there's definitely some structure to it. But also, I think it's just the vibe. You know, that signal of like you belong here is, is really lacking in a lot of places. That trust and that, I guess we say that that qualifying period or the qualifying steps, I'm now not the only person doing that. And I just know right off the bat that this person is, gets trustworthy, and they're humble, and they're a team player, and they're, they're in it for the right reasons. In the context of like what tan stack can be or will become, are you putting any groundwork in place for like, what you're striving for, or what you're aiming to eventually accomplish to be able to spend time actually doing the thing that you love, and being with the people that you love, or, or waking up every day and being excited about what you do. Yeah, but also having balance and, and community around you. So TanStack is a business, and we are definitely burning the candle at both ends to try and grow TanStack. And my dream would be to expand this experience that I'm having to as many people as want, as want to partake in that. It took eight years for me to figure out how to, how to make this work, right as a full time gig just for me. And now I've basically given myself the challenge of doing that for up to as many of my maintainers as I can possibly muster. Right. And then is that like, your focus right now is is kind of designing the business model of TanStack? That's more like a side quest, I would get bored, if that was the only thing. I'm not I'm not a businessman. If building a business meant letting go of kind of that technical side of myself, I would never do it because I would stop having fun. I love that, you know, when when we met years ago, it felt like you were you were just so excited about whatever the thing was you were going to show. It's a joy to watch you because you can just see the room sort of gravitate to circle around your screen and see whatever you're building because we can feel how much energy you've got. I also love that it isn't being driven by like how much money can we raise or how much can we charge for this? But rather how can we make this into something that allows more people to get to do the thing that they want to do? Yeah. I wish you nothing but the best that I cannot wait to come back in a few more years and have this conversation again and see what else is new. Yeah, you bet. All right, let's cut it. Do that with awesome. It's pretty clear that the industry is never going to stop evolving, but one thing remains true: the things that make builders into builders are really going to change.