Viktor Lidholt, Serverpod — Streamlining Full-Stack Dart for Faster Engineering Teams

David DeRemer:

Hi, welcome to Build to Succeed from Very Good Ventures. Today we meet with Viktor Lidholt, Founder of Serverpod, an open source scalable app server written in Dart for the Flutter community. In this episode, Viktor shares how his game industry roots and experience on the Flutter team at Google led him to start building a backend framework optimised for Dart and specifically Flutter. He explores product leadership, ecosystem insights, and how his team is shaping the next wave of developer tooling. I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome, Viktor.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Thank you.

David DeRemer:

Great to have you. Let's start our conversation today with something fun. What's something that you do outside of work that energizes you or influences you in what you do every day at work?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. So, I do a lot of CrossFit. So, I usually take a break at 11:00, is my class. Head down to the gym. I have the best of setups. There's a gym in the basement of the building where we have our Serverpod office. So, I go, that takes me a minute, do my class, eat lunch, and then I'm energized for the rest of the day.

David DeRemer:

That's amazing. Yeah. So, the question is, how many pull-ups can you do and do you kip or no kip?
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Viktor Lidholt:

If I do kipping, I've done 130.

David DeRemer:

Whoa, that's a lot of pull-ups.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. Not in a row. Not in a row.

David DeRemer:

Oh, wow.
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Viktor Lidholt:

During an hour.
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David DeRemer:

No, that's impressive. CrossFit's no joke, so good on you to bring that in. Do you feel like that helps to focus you or how does it help clarify your mind?
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Viktor Lidholt:

I think it definitely centers me. Having that little break in the day, I think is really helpful. You get a bit of a perspective on whatever you're working on. And running a startup, I'm sure you know or running a company can be pretty stressful at times. Just having that break when you're lifting weights, and jumping, and doing burpees, there's no way to think about work. So, you get a complete break from that. So, I really think that's a good thing. It's like not just the exercise, but it's a bit of a mindfulness thing for me.
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David DeRemer:

Right. I mean, I did CrossFit a long time ago. Way out of it at this point. But in terms of exercising, like an activity you can do, I feel like it's actually a good simulation to some extent of building a startup team, because when you're with a group, everyone's together. You're all supporting it, but you're still testing yourself because there's a lot of things that you're doing alone. And so, it's interesting. I've always thought it was an interesting one where it's really focused on you specifically, but in the context of the broader group. And everyone's trying to encourage each other to get their own personal best and stuff, which is kind of cool. I also know you've been travelling a lot recently. Obviously, I saw you in Berlin this year for Fluttercon. And I know you travel the world somewhat for various Flutter community events. Have you been to anywhere interesting recently?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. I got home this morning. If I look a little bit tired, it's because I slept on an airplane. But I spent the past five days in Nigeria, Lagos, visiting the FlutterBytes Conference there, which was awesome. I think it's a great community. It was I think 600 people at the conference, so Africa's biggest Flutter conference. And great vibe for the conference. And I think probably among the friendliest people I've hanged out with at the conference, so that was really awesome.
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David DeRemer:

That's wonderful. 600, that's a big crowd for what we're doing here in the Flutter ecosystem. So, you got Fluttercon EU, the US version. There's FlutterBytes. I know you've got Flutter & Friends. I think Fluttercon's doing one in India this year. I know there's some Flutter conferences in Japan these days. Have you been hitting as many of these as you can or what's your strategy for attending these events?
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Viktor Lidholt:
Yeah, all of them. There was also one a couple of weeks ago in Spain, Málaga. It was a little bit of a smaller event. I think it was like 220 people or so, but still, it was a great event. Also, nice place to visit, especially if you're a Swede this time of year. It's really gloomy here. So, getting away, getting a bit of sun. It's always a good energy boost going to the conferences, I think, and getting a feel for how excited everyone are about the whole Flutter community, and Flutter, and building stuff.

David DeRemer:

Yeah. It's just been great over the last couple of years post-COVID to see the resurgence of all these events and stuff, because obviously for a while there, all the meetups, all the conferences, everything was shut down or virtual. And I think you're seeing the people in real life, and seeing the enthusiasm. And making those personal connections is absolutely critical.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah, I think so too. I mean, it's a great way for us to get more people to see what we're doing with Serverpod, but also building your network. That's something I am a very strong believer in. Basically, connecting people. I always try to help out, even if there's not a good fit with say Serverpod or what we do. They can often be like, if you can find two people you can connect, that's always a win.

David DeRemer:

I totally agree. I sometimes think about what would I like to do in the future if I retire or something like that. And I think there's a lot of enthusiasm and excitement over just if you connect two people. And then you find out a year later that something amazing happened because you made that connection. I love those stories. But I want to get into the community stuff, because I know it's been a really important part of your efforts and your strategy to grow Serverpod, but let's maybe take a step back. And can you give us your story from beginning to where you are now, culminating maybe in what is Serverpod and why does it matter to the tech community?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Well, it's a long story, but let's do the shorter version of it. But I started programming when I was probably 12. Learned programming on Macintosh Plus. It was almost the original Macintosh, the black and white, two-color computer. And when I was a kid, grew up, I wanted to do computer games. And then I worked in the game industry for many years. I was a lead developer for one of Sweden's biggest game companies, and there I built a tool for building mobile games. And it got picked up by Zynga and another capital of the world starters game companies. So, Zynga bought it from me. And we made it open source and I moved to San Francisco to work for them. So, that was an exciting time. Then I got an offer from a startup in San Francisco, because all the clients used my tools to build the games.

So, they gave me a team of 10 developers. And I worked there for two years and it was a fun time. They used my tools to teach game development at MIT, UC Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon. I got to go to all those places, give lectures, and travel to conferences all over. Unfortunately, they ran out of money, a start up sometimes, too, and then they sold me to Google, where I ended up on the Flutter team. So, I worked at the Flutter team for... it was about a year. That was very early on, it was before the release of the first version or public 1.0. It was all up on GitHub, all of the code, but I don't think anyone was using it at the time.

So, I moved back to Stockholm, had another startup. I built a news app. And while building that, obviously I used Flutter, but I really missed having a good backend for it. So, when that failed, I felt like I wanted to give startups a second chance, do everything right this time. And something I had really been missing was having a good backend in Dart. So, that's really where the idea for Serverpod was born.

David DeRemer:

So, you got exposed to Flutter and Dart as a result of that acqui-hire into Google. You got placed on the Flutter team. Did you have any agency in that decision to be placed on the Flutter team or did Google just put you there and it ends up being a serendipitous thing?
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Viktor Lidholt:

So, the startup I worked for, they tried to sell the whole company. We were maybe 100 people, 80 developers or something like that. So, they shopped us around at Google, Twitter, Dropbox. We did interviews at all these places. And then they didn't manage to sell the whole company, but Google bought the top eight developers and then they sold a bunch of other developers to a gaming company. It's crazy that it works like that in Silicon Valley, but it was the reality of it. But I was in the US for a work visa and H1B. And if you don't have a job, basically you have a week to pack your bag and leave the country. So, I got more or less an ultimatum. You sign for Google tomorrow or you have a new job tomorrow. So, it was an easy choice, also not the bad place to end up, right?

David DeRemer:

Sure. Yeah. But it's cool that you found Flutter and Google, like Flutter and Dark this way. And then here you are building backends with Dart.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. I feel like it was a pretty good match for me, because my background in doing a lot of low-level computer graphics, and game engines, and all that stuff. So, I had pretty good understanding, I would say, about mobile. And I thought Flutter was really a project that was exciting to me to work on, but I was only a year at Google.

David DeRemer:

Well, it's cool. I mean, I think a lot of people probably don't know this about you, that you were so early on the Flutter team and then that's where the... Because I mean, obviously we see you in the community for Serverpod and we know you've been around, but it's been a long time now. So, it's cool to get that context, like your enthusiasm. And that connection to gaming is really cool, because I've heard people say Flutter's kind of like a 2D game engine for user interfaces. So, that's cool to see that story art connecting all the dots to get to where you are today.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. No. I had a great experience at Google. So, it was a very cool company and it's cool to see from the inside. I didn't realize before I joined how many things they do and how many cool things they do. You see the search engine, now I guess you see the AI, but there're loads of projects and products that may be released in five or maybe even 10 years. It's not so many companies that can build products on that time scale, like really big things.

David DeRemer:

Yeah. It is impressive. Obviously, Google is so massive and they do so many things. And it's very easy to find fault with a lot of their decisions and how they do things, because everything they do, good or bad, is at a big scale. But I think you're right, that they're making investments and bets. Even the AI stuff I think is largely... the transformer pattern is because of Google researchers figured that out. And all the tensor work they were doing over the years and all those sorts of things. Although, one time I went to a Firebase summit and an engineer was like, "Yeah, all this machine learning stuff exists so that YouTube could figure out how to serve videos of cats to people that like watching videos of cats more effectively."

And it's like, oh, that's where all this AI stuff came from, is YouTube recommended videos, pretty much, but it's kind of fascinating. 

So, you mentioned that you were missing this backend for Dart. And when you were building your first startup and building an app and all that, what was the insight or sequence of steps that got you to feel like, you know what, this is a piece that's really missing from this ecosystem and I'm going to solve it?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Right. I started writing our backend in Python, because we used a lot of... It was before generative AI was a thing, but there was still a lot of text analysis tools available in Python that was definitely the easiest to use, and set up and worked the best. So, I used them and then I figured like, yeah, I'll just do everything in Python. And I hated it so much. One day I just ripped out the core methods or features I needed in Python, made it into a tiny little server, and then I rewrote everything in Dart, but it wasn't like a framework. It was just like a raw server.

So, that's quite a lot of more work to build your APIs that way, so that made me think someone should really do this. And so, we have a great backend solution, a little bit like what Flutter is to Dart on the front end, something like server is for Dart on the backend. And it felt like it really was a missing piece in the ecosystem. I mean, there was Dart Shelf, but it didn't feel sufficient, at least for what I needed.
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David DeRemer:

Yeah. And a lot of people in the Flutter community would default to Firebase and things like that, but they never really built a Dart, first party Dart SDK for Firebase, which I think a lot of people always were clamoring for that and saying, "Hey, if you did this, we could just be writing Dart on both sides." So, I think that missed opportunity creates opportunity for others to come in and innovate.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. I mean, I started looking at Firebase when I built our app there, but the things we were doing had to do a lot of server side stuff, scraping websites. And then also, the Firestore document database structure wasn't really a great match for what we were building, so it wasn't really a solution. I'm sure Firebase works great for some type of apps, but it's not like a sort of fits everything.
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David DeRemer:

So, with Serverpod, obviously one of the advantages that you can write full stack Dart, you can write Dart for Flutter, your front end code with Flutter, and you can write Dart for your Serverpod code in the backend. And that allows for some code reuse and sharing across that stack, which would be awesome. What are the architectural or product features of Serverpod that are differentiated or specific to Serverpod, that maybe people don't know about or would want to learn about?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. So, we put a lot of time, and effort, and thinking into making Serverpod a really smooth experience to work with. So, something that we built in Serverpod that is kind of unique is that you just add your methods to the server. We'll analyze your server code and replicate the same methods in your client, and then we generate a whole API in between. So, you don't really have to worry about the API. Under the hood, it's like a well-formed dressed API, so there's no real magic. It just feels like magic. So, it's a much more seamless experience. You have to add methods on the server, and you call them from your front end, and it just works. So, that is a pretty sweet experience. And also, you need to put your methods in an endpoint methods. We solve a lot of issues that otherwise can be hard with things like Firebase. When you have to version your API, say for mobile apps, you can have old clients that need to be able to connect to your server.

In Serverpod now, you can just inherit or from an endpoint to create a new copy of that endpoint, and add new stuff to it, and you still have the old one there. So, that's a pretty cool feature that we've added I think that people may not know. It's pretty new, so we're going to push it more into like the next version of Serverpod. But it's really a super feature, because it will just save you a ton of work.
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David DeRemer:

Right. Yeah, that's awesome. In terms of integrating with databases or other third party systems, do you just have full flexibility in that regard? Or what's the scope of what Serverpod can do for someone?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. I mean, you have full flexibility in terms of you can use any Dart packages to connect to external services or you can use other REST APIs. Nowadays, if there's something missing in Dart, it's pretty easily generated for Dart with generative AI. But we do have really, really great support for Postgres. So, we built a complete ORM. We did all the hard parts, database migrations. That works great. We have support for relations, joints. Many ORMs are... you start making the easy parts where you can basically take a row and convert it to an object. And then you get to the harder parts, building queries that are type-safe and stuff like that. And maybe you fail, but we spent a year figuring out how to do it, do it right. So, that's actually a really cool feature set of Serverpod as well.
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David DeRemer:

That's awesome.
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Viktor Lidholt:

And you get like all the auto complete in your editor and all that stuff, since it's all type-safe, which is really nice.
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David DeRemer:

Got you. Nice. And can you tell me a little bit about the deployment and how Serverpod...? If I'm a new customer to you and I'm evaluating this, is this a thing that you guys run, and I have to contract with your infrastructure, and run everything with you or is it portable to different cloud providers? Or how does it work in that ecosystem?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. So, Serverpod is all open source, so you can run it any way you want. You can run it on Google Cloud. It's pretty easy to set up on... Is it called Cloud Run, for instance?
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David DeRemer:

Mm-hmm.
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Viktor Lidholt:

You can run it on AWS, so you can run it on your computer in your basement if you want that, or you can run it on Serverpod Cloud and then it's even easier. It's really easy configuration. So, you have your Serverpod, you just type S cloud deploy and we set up a full infrastructure with load balancers, database, domain names, all that stuff. So, it's a little bit like a magic-
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David DeRemer:

I love it.
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Viktor Lidholt:

... turnkey solution for deployments of your Serverpod. And so, we'll be able to support any Dart servers as well. It's really no difference. It's just we started making it really good for Serverpod and then we'll go from there. But that's something we've been working on for the past two years. And it's in a private beta now. But if you join our Discord, we can hook it up if you want to try it out, basically.
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David DeRemer:

Right on. I like how you positioned it as like Flutter is the framework for Dart on the front end and Serverpod is the framework for Dart on the backend. 

Would you compare it? I mean, I'm trying to make sure that anyone who might be listening to this can wrap it where they... how to think about what Serverpod is. Would you compare it to like a Node.js or like a Ruby on Rails type thing? Or what do you think would be the closest comparison to some other ecosystem or is it totally different, you think?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. No. It's probably pretty similar to Node.js, in that sense that you have Node.js and then you have React.
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David DeRemer:

Got you. Perfect.
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Viktor Lidholt:

But no one has really done it for Dart. I know you have Dart Frog obviously, but the scope is smaller, which is great for some projects. I think it's sort of a different fit for different projects, what you want to go with there. If you're doing something small, if you're doing a bigger app with like... For instance, a really killer feature that we have in Serverpod is streaming. So, in your server, you can just make a method that returns to stream, and then you can listen to that stream from your Flutter app, and that works.

You can have 100 streams in your Flutter app that connects to your server, pipe it through a single web socket, and routes all the messages to the right methods on the server, keeps track of the life cycle of the connection on the client, all those things that are otherwise quite a lot of work to set up and get right. And there are a lot of small little things that you... pitfalls you can fall into and not get it right if you write it. So, we really did all the hard parts there so our users can just do the fun things.
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David DeRemer:

Yeah, that's great. I think it's wonderful that we have options all the way from Shelf, things like Dart Frog and Serverpod. There are different levels of complexity and work that's done to make it more effective for a developer to pick where they want to go in that ecosystem. 

I know you're working on something new, too, that you've code named Relic. Can you tell us a little bit about maybe some of the upcoming things you guys are working on within Serverpod, what we could look forward to?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. We have a lot of things coming up. So, Relic is probably one that is closest to be done. It's going to be released in a 1.0 version probably in the next few weeks. We're basically finalizing the documentation and making that really nice. That's something that's been lacking a little bit for Shelf—hasn't been super great documentation on how to find good examples. So, we're putting together both a suite of examples, but also really good documentation. 

As we see it, we started with Shelf and then we have just fixed everything that we thought were a little bit awkward or not that great in Shelf. Shelf was written quite a long time ago when Dart looked different, so Shelf has a great support for type-safety. There are lots of dynamic types that you pass into methods, which is not good practice anymore. For efficiency and for all sorts of reasons, you want to keep things as typed as possible.

When you pass HTTP headers, they're all typed now. So, instead of passing a string with a date that you need to know how to format, you'll pass the daytime, or the same with cookies, or any of these other things, and they just work. And you can add your own extension methods if you have custom headers even. And then we looked at the inside. There're like a ton of updates, many smaller ones. And then we made the interface look very similar to Shelf, so you can use that, but we also added a bunch of shorthands that makes it easier to work with.
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David DeRemer:

That's amazing.
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Viktor Lidholt:

So, that's an exciting release coming up. And we're also working on Serverpod 3 that is close to being done. And we have migrated Serverpod 3 to work on top of Relic, so that's the reason we really rewrote Shelf. We felt like it didn't really fit the bill for what we wanted to do with Serverpod, so we made sure to make it really, really good. And then we are building Serverpod on top of that. And that gives Serverpod things like middleware support also and a really good web server.
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David DeRemer:

That's wonderful. I think it's also a great example of the power of open source software communities, because you were using Shelf, which helped you to get started. You learned a lot along the way building Serverpod. Started thinking, "Oh, how can we make this better?" And then realize like, "Well, actually, we can just make a lot of improvements," but then also give that to the community as part of what you're doing. So, thank you for doing that, tackling those problems, and helping Dart and the overall community of people building with these tools, giving them more options and more opportunities. 

I wanted to ask you a little bit how you guys have been growing, too, so your customer base over the years as Serverpod has grown, the Flutter and Dart community has grown. How has your customer base changed over the years? Or I guess, what is it showing you about the Flutter community in terms of the customers you're starting to see use Serverpod?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. So, unfortunately, with Serverpod, we can't really measure super well on the DT. We don't really track our users in that respect. I mean, we can see how many downloads or when someone is using the CLI tool. So, we can see that there's thousands of apps being built, but we don't know what these apps are or anything like that. But obviously, we know the people we speak with. And that's something that's been really cool at these conferences, because for every conference we've been to, there's a larger share of people we meet there that are using Serverpod for the projects and some pretty big ones, too.

And a lot of app agencies that they're building with Flutter has starting using Serverpod, because it gives them... Basically, they can build the products faster, is probably the main point. But they can also quite easily reuse code between projects, which is huge for some app agents, if they build similar typed apps. So, I think we've seen over the past year, like a year ago, it was more hobby developers we met that used Serverpod. Now it's more app agencies or pretty serious funded startups. So, that's definitely a change that is very exciting to see for us.
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David DeRemer:

Obviously, you can't track all the implementations of it since it is open source, but I think you have an interesting pulse on the growth of the Dart ecosystem from a different angle, I think, from other companies in the ecosystem that might be providing a service to a Flutter app that's already been built or chosen. The server decision is a very different decision, and I think that's pretty cool. And I know you've also said one of your goals is to get people into Dart and Flutter as a result of Serverpod, not the other way around, right?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah, right. Now people choose us, because they use Flutter. But in the future, people will choose Flutter because they love Serverpod.

David DeRemer:

I love that. If you were to talk to somebody who's considering, “how could I build my server side logic for my app,” what is the most powerful or maybe underrated technical advantage of Serverpod that you think a CTO or somebody sitting down might not know about or should really deeply consider as to why to go after Serverpod, as opposed to all the other options that are out there?
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Viktor Lidholt:

Well, I would say there are many reasons, but a few that comes to mind that I've gotten as feedback from some of our users is that sometimes you do things in your Flutter app that you realize should really be on the server side. It can be different form of validations of data and stuff like that. And if you have a separate team that writes in a different language and they need to replicate those, that usually may not happen. But if you use Flutter or Serverpod, you can just copy-paste that code and place it in the right spot or share it between the app and the server. So, that's a pretty cool thing, having everything in the same language. Also, when you're hiring, it's so much easier for Flutter developer—if they need to do some small change on the backend—if it's using the same language, the same project, everything else fits together like one unit, it's much, much easier for them to go to fix that little thing that they made themselves, rather than talking to the backend engineer or even maybe project manager in between.

So, that's also something for efficiency. And how you can, as a company, recruit people that know Flutter and Dark, is much easier than finding full slack developers to know say go and Flutter or JavaScript the Flutter, or the perfect combination of the two. So, for startups or app agencies, that's a huge advantage, also when it comes to recruiting and time to build stuff.
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David DeRemer:

And it's also been something that I think the JavaScript community has held over the heads of the Dart and Flutter community, of like, well, it's full stack. We've got Node.js and JavaScript, TypeScript on the backend. You've got React, you've got React Native. And for a lot of years, React and React Native was just kind of like clever branding. They actually weren't that... just because you built something in React, it didn't mean you could just put it on mobile with React Native and vice versa. I know there's been some work to try to help with that, but Dart in the early days didn't really have that full stack story. So, now thanks to you and the efforts of Shelf, and Dart Frog, and all these other things, we have more full stack options. And I think that Dart is, especially if you're a TypeScript, JavaScript developer, Dart is a relatively straightforward language to pick up in terms of its similarness.

So, I think it's just wonderful for us to have these options, and to be able to make these choices, and to have teams like yours really putting a lot of time, and energy to not just make a product that does the thing, but also to invest in the infrastructure like you're doing with Relic, to make it all better. So, it's great to see. 

So, you're building these tools, this developer tooling and we're talking about all the benefits of Serverpod. But I also want to crack into your startup founder point of view, because you've done that several times. You've also worked at big companies like Google. You had a startup that didn't go well and out of that came Serverpod, but it's all the trajectory and the learnings.

What practices or insights have you picked up over the years through that journey that has enabled your small team now to move fast and build something really ambitious? Because this is not an easy problem you're solving. It's technically difficult. What has helped you to move quickly and figure out what to build?
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Viktor Lidholt:

I think there are a couple of things that I learned from my previous experiences. One is, be very careful and spend a lot of time on recruitment, making sure that people we hire are really skilled. It doesn't really matter too much if they know Dart. I think that's something you can pick up if you're a good developer, but this can be different for different types of projects. But for something like Serverpod, it's so complex. It's like really the nitty-gritty details of generating code, analyzing the Dart side of things, building trees of parsed data. There's a lot of pretty complex stuff in there, so really need good developers. So, spending that extra time finding good talent, I think is super important. 

But another learning is that if you have a startup, maybe this is true for many companies, you never know the outcome. It's very insecure in a way. We raised money, so we're good for a pretty good while, but you never know. And we're doing everything we can for it to work out, obviously, and putting all that effort in, but there's a chance it won't work out. So, I figure the important thing is we should have fun doing this. Then if it were to fail, we kinda won anyway, because we had a couple of great years building this. If you just think about getting that next release out or whatever it is, I think there's also a bigger risk of failure. If you have fun and build a team together you like working with, the chances for success is much, much greater, too. 
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David DeRemer:

Yeah. That's fantastic advice. As founders or especially founders, you're in this interesting spot where you have this big, bold goal, it's very high risk. And a lot of times you don't even have necessarily full control over whether or not you're going to be successful, because you can make an amazing product that fits the market well. But maybe right when you launch, there's a big economic downturn or something. There's so many external factors that it's a tough position. And one thing that I think is interesting as a founder, especially in the very early days, let's say the first three to five years. Maybe if you raise a series C or D or whatever, it's a different story, but like quitting is not an option. You can't just be like, "Oh, I don't like this job. I'm going to go just change jobs." As a founder, you can't really do that.

And I think that creates a pressure or tension to really make sure that what you're doing is motivating to you, is passionate to you. And like you're saying, and out of... I personally have felt like when people are bringing passion to something, the outputs are so much better. The carrot-stick model of incentives in companies and business, I think they don't nearly create the result of when people are just genuinely interested and passionate about what they're trying to accomplish. So, I think that insight of making sure you're having fun and enjoying it, I love that idea, too. That at the end, even if for whatever number of myriad reasons that you can't control, it doesn't work out, as long as you can look back on that time and be like, "We had fun and we learned something and we did something cool together," you've already won.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah, I think so. And for me, I think I need to work in a startup. Being in a big company, it's fine for a little bit, but I have too much creativity, ideas that I need to get out somehow.
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David DeRemer:

Yeah. Well, I mean, it's great the world has both. I think if big companies were run by startup founders all the time and that's what everybody was, it would be complete chaos.
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Viktor Lidholt:

100%.
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David DeRemer:

And so, you need the Googles of the world, like we were describing before, just in terms of the sheer scale, and the time horizons, and the investments they can make at such a massive scale. But then you need small, creative, really passionate people who are working to really change very important problems in different ways. So, need more people like you out there for sure. 

So, you are very active and have been in the Flutter community space for a very long time. I think it's an obvious benefit to you to immerse yourself in those communities to attract people to it. What are some other advantages of showing up at all these events and being such an active contributor to the community, creating open source, writing content, and contributing, and just being like a known person and company within that ecosystem? What are some of the advantages you've had maybe beyond the obvious of the opportunity to maybe meet a customer?
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Viktor Lidholt:

The feeling of being a rockstar. No, I'm kidding. But yes, I had my 15 minutes of fame at one conference. The crowd was chanting my name when I entered the stage.
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David DeRemer:

Awesome. Love that.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. Otherwise, I mean, to be fair, I mostly do it to build our brand and raise awareness. But also, I think what I get back the most is probably all the connections I get, especially when I go to conferences, and meet people in person, and they know me. And I get a chance to meet all these people, that I think that's the biggest thing, maybe on a personal level.
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David DeRemer:

Yeah. I think that's important to highlight, though, because I think one of the things that I've been trying to help the community of... especially the enterprise user base within the Flutter community saying, "Hey, we need you here. We need you at the Flutter events. We need these bigger companies that have large teams and maybe 100 engineers or more, we need them there." And there's a little bit of a question of why. What benefit does a company get out of showing up at this event? The obvious ones are like, "Well, maybe I can get more customers by making the people more aware that we exist." Or the second thing might be, "Maybe I can hire or recruit people." But what you just highlighted, I think is really important, that I think if you're looking very tactically on how many leads did I get and then how many leads did I convert—and that's how you're judging the value of attendance at an event—you're missing a bigger picture, which is that maybe in the course of that event, you encountered 100 people that had a personal interaction with you, that you created a connection, that relationship. It might be that the benefit isn't within six months of the event you've signed a new customer. It might be that six years later that contact has developed into a friend or a network. And professionally, that can unlock something or could make a connection like you were describing before of like, "Oh, you know who you should talk to? Is Viktor." And then all of a sudden, boom, years later. And that's really hard to quantify, but I think what you just hit on there is super important. That gets lost a lot of times.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Yeah. I think we touched a little bit on that in the beginning here also. Just helping people out that you meet along the way, it may not have an immediate effect. But I think in the longer term, it definitely will have, because maybe just help someone or connect two people that can help each other out, but all that will come back if you do it enough times to you in many good forms. So, I think that's also a great way to look at it. If you go to a networking event and just focus on the persons that you know this could be a potential sale or this can be like, "I want to talk with this person because of this," I think you miss out. So, it's good to not ignore the persons that may not look interesting. And if you can give them a helping hand along the way, that can maybe help them now, but help you or help someone they will help in the future, help you. Who knows?
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David DeRemer:

Yeah. I think that's good advice, not just for tech communities, but for all communities. In terms of communities and where you see Flutter going, do you see any needs within the Flutter community or things that if we had this or could approach certain things better within the Flutter community, it would improve...? And Dart, let's be more broad about Dart. What things would really help these Dart communities grow and thrive more in the years ahead, you think?
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Viktor Lidholt:

I think it's really cool that the Flutter team is breaking out material and cupertino from the sort of core of Flutter. I think that opens up doors for the future, for the communities to step up, and build high quality packages for different types of UIs. So, that is definitely something I think the community can step up and do a better job. There're already, I mean, some amazing stuff out there. We're using Shut CM for Serverpod Cloud, our console for instance, and that works pretty good. 

But something I kind of started a little bit is doing native liquid glass implementation with... What's it called? Platform use. Actually, works pretty well. So, you can get liquid glass proper in your Flutter app. Getting that to a production level is something that would be super cool if we could do as a community effort. You can do it pretty easy if you just use platform use. It's not that hard, but it would be nice to have a full library so you can just drop it in and have it working. So, that's something. And maybe you shouldn't be done with platform use. It's possible that you can do it even more efficient, so you may want to do some research into that. But having that, I think would be a super cool thing for the Flutter community and moving a little bit faster on those. So, make sure it's up to par with whatever is the latest and greatest on each platform.
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David DeRemer:

That's great. We'll wrap us up here with a couple of quick fire questions. One thing I wanted to just get your point of view on. Given your interesting career arc through games, building tools for that community, Google, and a couple of startups, and building server side Dart tools here with Serverpod, what's one lesson from your career that you've learned that you think 10 years from now will still hold true?
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Viktor Lidholt:

I already touched upon it. But it's like, make sure you have fun. Whatever you do is... development work should be fun.
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David DeRemer:

Totally.
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Viktor Lidholt:

That is my belief anyway.
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David DeRemer:

I like it.
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Viktor Lidholt:

And I always enjoyed it, but maybe it's easier said than done sometimes.
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David DeRemer:

Yeah. To some extent, otherwise, what's the point? You're using your very precious time. And some people chase money, some people chase prestige or a sense of accomplishment. But at the end of the day, you got to enjoy the ride. 

Viktor, thank you so much for joining us today, and sharing your story, and for all the contributions you've made to the Dart community. I hope that anyone listening takes an interest in Serverpod, checks out what you're doing, and can hopefully give it a try, and use it within their business. Because it's definitely, I think, a really important part of the ecosystem and has really helped Dart, and Flutter, and the overall ecosystem be more robust and able to provide this full stack story for everybody. If people wanted to follow your work, explore Serverpod, pursue careers with you, where could they find out more?
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Viktor Lidholt:

So, serverpod.dev is the easiest place to start. With Serverpod, obviously, we have also an academy, which is like a four to six hour class with video tutorials you can follow along to learn Serverpod. And you can follow me on LinkedIn or X, Viktor Lidholt, if you want to find me.
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David DeRemer:

Awesome. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you spending some time with us, and sharing your story, and thanks again for everything you've done.
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Viktor Lidholt:

Thank you.
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David DeRemer:

Thank you for joining us on Build to Succeed, a Very Good Ventures podcast. We hope you enjoy exploring the experiences and insights of leaders that have built successful digital products. Please take a moment to leave us a review. And if you want to get our latest episodes, don't forget to subscribe. Thanks again and see you next time.

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