43: A Marathon Not a Sprint

**Dan Benjamin** (0:12)
Ever quit a job, ever redefine yourself within one, ever started something in one big, or failed?
Quit his call-in show, helping people sort out their lives, reevaluate their options, kick their crummy corporate stud jobs to the curb, and start something awesome.
Instead of doing our regular call-in show, I'm here at New Relic Studios in San Francisco, ready to talk to Lew Cirne, the CEO, the founder of the company. With me here is Heidi Cook. Let's get started.
So I'm here today at this amazing new facility that I that I'm here to build. Hi, Hattie, by the way. And we're here. We're both here at New Relic Studios. I guess that's what we're calling it. This is this amazing facility. I recorded an hour or two ago here with Merlin Mann. We did an episode of Back to Work. And not only am I here in this beautiful place, in this beautiful San Francisco city where the weather is amazing, but I'm here with the founder and CEO of New Relic, Lew Cirne. Welcome to the program. How are you today?

**Lew Cirne** (1:15)
I'm doing great. It's just awesome to be here.

**Dan Benjamin** (1:17)
Can you believe this?

**Lew Cirne** (1:18)
No, I really can't.

**Dan Benjamin** (1:20)
I met you back in, what, like 2008?

**Lew Cirne** (1:23)
About nine-ish?

**Dan Benjamin** (1:24)
Yeah, eight or nine.

**Lew Cirne** (1:25)
Yeah.

**Dan Benjamin** (1:25)
And you were down in Kissimmee, Florida. I was speaking at this little conference. You guys were one of the sponsors. You had a little table set up.

**Lew Cirne** (1:32)
Yeah, we maybe had like 12 employees at the time.

**Dan Benjamin** (1:35)
It's amazing. And now look at this place. You've got, is it three or four floors of this building that you have now?

**Lew Cirne** (1:40)
We're just taking out the fourth of the top floors of the building. So we're going into the fourth floor now.

**Dan Benjamin** (1:45)
It's amazing. And I saw you and Chris Kelly tweeting about how you wanted to start doing some recordings and some things like that. You want to do a podcast. And I said, guys, let me help out.

**Lew Cirne** (1:57)
Totally. Yeah. No, I came up to Chris and I said, look, we've got to find a way to get Dan out here, Dan and Hattie. And like, you know, they're the smartest people I know of in making podcasts and make them awesome. So we don't know what we're doing in that area.
So I'm just glad you could spend some time with us and help us fit this out. And we're excited to use this for the community, right? I mean, there's a lot of New Relic stuff coming out of here, but we just want all sorts of voices in and around software.

**Dan Benjamin** (2:26)
But what you guys do, I mean, what you guys do for the community, whether it's software development or design or just, you know, in the creative space is amazing. And I just want to tell people, like, this place is amazing. I remember I read an article about it. Hattie, what do you think of this?

**Heidi Cook** (2:43)
Oh my gosh, this is insane.

**Dan Benjamin** (2:44)
We've been to a lot of places, and you've got to be honest.

**Heidi Cook** (2:47)
I mean, even if you just had one floor, that would be amazing, but you have three.

**Dan Benjamin** (2:51)
Right, just one floor decked out the way you guys have it.

**Heidi Cook** (2:53)
Right, like, it's insane.

**Dan Benjamin** (2:54)
But the thing is, and this is what you see, back in the.com era, you saw a lot of money wasted on stuff.
This is not money wasted. The way that you've designed this place, the way that you've designed the space to be cohesive and to inspire people, and the way that you've designed the little meeting rooms and the way that the open space is, it's really, really cool. And it's not, you don't get the feeling of excess when you're in here, but it's things done right.

**Lew Cirne** (3:24)
Well, you know, we thought a lot really hard on it, and we certainly wanted to invest in making this a place where people love their job, love their Mondays. And the number one factor in that, of course, is just who you work with, right? And so that's the most important thing we focus on in trying to build an environment where people do amazing stuff is you enjoy who you work with.
But then we thought about when we came into this space in February, we knew this was the first time the company is going to be split across multiple floors. And so we thought hard about how do we keep the special part in New Relic where everybody, you know, no matter where you work in the company, you feel a sense of connection to the other parts of the company.