The Business of Open Source

This week’s full-length episode is with Bhaskar, founder of YottaDB. This episode was recorded on-site at All Things Open last week, and we covered a wide range of topics. Including:

• How the open source ecosystem, and the open source business ecosystem, has changed over the past 30+ years.
• Who can responsibly self-support an open source database, and who really needs to have someone to call if things go wrong. 
• The spectrum of professionalism among open source developers 
• How YottaDB started out as a project developed inside a larger company that was in financial services; and Bhaskar decided to spin it out as it’s own company.
• The challenge articulating the value of support contracts, especially for software that is reliable. Bhaskar says he is selling peace of mind more than anything else; and he works with customers to avoid incidents — because ultimately avoiding an incident is a better outcome for everyone than a quick recovery from an incident. 
• How to convince people that they are actually not as good at managing open source databases as they think they are. 
• We also talked about conference strategies: according to Bhaskar, the way he’s decided which conferences to exhibit at is a series of trial and error — and by the way, this is something I’ve heard from many people. Yes, you have to think about where your customers are, not where your friends are, but sometimes you don’t know ahead of time which conferences are going to have the best ROI. 

I’m working with YottaDB right now on how to differentiate themselves in the crowded database market — and we talk about that process a bit right now. If you’re having trouble standing out in a crowded market, you might want to work with me. 

This special episode of The Business of Open Source with Tatiana Krupenya, CEO of DBeaver, was recorded on site at All Things Open 2024. 

It’s a short conversation, so we addressed one main question: What is the difference between running an open source company versus as proprietary software company? Tatiana says the difference is big — and it’s complicated. 

The bottom line: Your OSS can be your main competitor, and your customers have to really see the value in your commercial offering if you want to make sales.

##

If you aren't sure how to talk to your potential customers are about why they should use your commercial offering, you might want to work with me. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, about the definition of open source and… the definition of open source AI. We recorded this episode on-site at All Things Open, so there’s a little bit of background noise. 

We talked about why OSI felt like it needed to develop a definition of open source AI, how “open source” is enforced, and the thought process behind the definition that the OSI ultimately published. 

We talked about open data quite a bit — different kinds of data, what kind of information and data is important to researchers and professionals in the AI space, and if there’s a way to include AI models that are trained on proprietary data in the definition of open source AI. 

If you are interested in open source AI, definitely check out this behind-the-scenes discussion of how, and why, this definition was published — and what the future likely holds for defining open source AI. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick , the co-CEO of Grist Labs and CTO of Grist Labs. We talked about managing growth of users versus growth of revenue, moving to an open source approach for technical, not technical, reasons, and open-source related product management questions for open source companies. 

Some really interesting themes we talked about:

• Moving from a SaaS first approach to also focusing on enterprise sales. Why they did that, what other sales channels that opened and what questions it also forced the company to address
• User personas versus buyer personas
• The situations in which Grist is the best option — which incidentally I could not understand from the website or the project documentation
• The relationship between the open source project and both enterprise sales and SaaS sign-ups. 
• How open source has been critical for a strategic relationship Grist has with the French government, which has been important for increasing product development velocity
• Giving up ‘darlings’ or features that they really want to develop but that they don’t think would drive revenue
• The difference Anais sees between running Grist and running non-open-source companies — one of the most interesting differences is that users often have a sense of ownership over the project that you just wouldn’t see in a fully proprietary 
• How open source true believers often work in large companies and control budgets, and should not be underestimated. 
• Why trying to sell based on features — including telling yourself that if you just had one more feature, you’d unlock all the sales — was a big mistake. 

Are you struggling with price anchors fixed around zero dollars, or can’t figure out how to manage the push and pull of developing open source and building a business? You might want to work with me. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs. We had a really far-ranging conversation that included talking about why documentation is often so bad, why documentation should be a priority, but also Eric’s experience building Read the Docs and Write the Docs. This episode was interesting because it’s both about building an open source company and also about the importance documentation for software projects in general and open source projects. 

Some things we covered included: 

• What is documentation? Is it a marketing effort, is it a part of the project itself? Eric talks about how good documentation for an open source project is a clear signal of a level of seriousness for the project. 
• How Read the Docs was really started to support open source projects, and that is part of why there’s no enterprise installs — either you use the open source code on your own, or you use the hosted product.
• How Eric sees building in the open as a way to help other people become better software engineers, but that ‘helping companies use Read the Docs for free’ is not the reason he wanted to build an open source company, and he’s still not sure how to feel about the fact that this happens. 
• You don’t get bonus points for being open source or bonus points for being bootstrapped — it won’t prevent a potential customer from using a competitive product because it has a feature that Read the Docs doesn’t have. 
• How open source in general — and even documentation in general — can help build brand value, but it is super hard to quantify and put in a slide in a board meeting to justify an investment in open source. 
• The decision to build Read the Docs as a business stemmed from the pressure that Eric got from having a successful open source project. 
• How they tried very hard to avoid accepting advertisements, but they should have started doing so much sooner because it turned out advertisements is well-aligned with the things they want to be working on. 
• The difference in risk between being open source for a database company versus an app-level open source project like Read the Docs; for Read the Docs one of the risks is the brand damage associated with people running the OSS on-prem and doing a bad job. 

Are you the founder of an open source company and struggling with figuring out how to manage the relationship between the project and product? You might want to work with me. 

Enjoy the show? Help it reach more people by leaving a review and sharing with your friends. 

Today on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Chris Holmes, co-founder and CEO of Greymatter. Greymatter is deeply involved in the open source ecosystem and maintains the Go Envoy Control Plane, but Chris is adamant that it is not an open source company. We had a great discussion about why that is, what it means for the company and the conversations he ends up having around open source with his customers and partner companies. 

Some particularly interesting points that came up:

• Customers worry that buying Greymatter could force them to buy enterprise versions of open source software — and Chris thinks that this could be a symptom of the fact that many users expect that they’ll end up being forced to pay for something they don’t want to pay for
• How open source companies, and open source projects in general, can be viewed as risky if they are only backed by one company
• Who is gonna pay for open source? How if you are going to get away from open source projects being aggressively monetized, big companies have to put their money where their mouth is and pay for open source development directly
• Why and how to get started selling to governments. Yes, the sales cycles are longer but the deals tend to be very sticky once you get in — and why Chris actually finds it easier to sell to the military than to large enterprises. 
• What benefits Greymatter gets from being a maintainer of the Go Envoy Control Plane. 

Struggling with how to get your product strategy right, and find the right balance between your open source project and your commercial offering? Not sure how your user audience and customer market relate to each other? You might want to work with me. 

This week on the Business of Open Source, I spoke with David Höck, co-founder of Vendure. We talked about switching licenses from MIT to GPL, the ways that Vendure is different from it’s competitors and how architectural decisions can be a powerful differentiator for an open source company. 

Favorite quote: “You need to build your product together with your clients.” 

Some specifics we talked about that you should pay attention to: 

• Why they switched to GPL in order to encourage more people to reach out to them and get more visibility into who was using their open source project
• On the other hand, they wanted to make sure that big companies building commercial platforms on top of Vendure’s platform are forced to pay for a commercial license. 
• They also wanted to choose a less-permissive license, but something that was still well-known and wouldn’t cause a lot of confusion among users or potential customers
• The difference between being happy with people using your software for free, and being happy with competitors using your software to build a competitive product, without offering any support to the underlying software. 
• Do your customers care about whether you are VC-backed or bootstrapped? We had an interesting conversation about this, because Vendure is bootstrapped. I think we settled on a real important nugget — if your technology is really critical to the company, they will care about your long-term sustainability. Being bootstrapped can help convince potential customers that you are independent and will be sustainable for the long term. 
• The top advantage of open source, David says, is the ability to get fast product feedback from a community. —> I just was talking with someone yesterday about this advantage of an open source strategy, I think it is under-discussed but extremely important. 

If you’re the founder of an open source company struggling with your product strategy — uncertain how to differentiate between project or product or how to differentiate the entire company in the ecosystem; don’t know what your project is supposed to do for your business; aren’t clear on the target market for your project or product — you might want to work with me. Find out more here. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Allard Buijze, the CTO and founder at AxonIQ. We talked a lot about the importance of open source for getting feedback on your product and validating your idea — or not. 

One of the things we talked about was how the beginning of AxonIQ was tied to the same consultancy that developed Spring Source; Rod Johnson, the founder and CEO of Spring Source was on the podcast a couple months ago and you can listen to that episode here. 

We talked about: 

• Spinning the company out of the an established company, and in particular how Allard ended up becoming co-founders with his former boss, and got buy-in from their previous employer to found the company after the open source project took open. 
• How they underestimated some elements of human psychology around sunk costs and how it would impact people’s willingness to move from the open source project to the paid product
• Why they originally had two products, and then decided to merge them into one single product
• How the key turning point for the company was when a new salesperson joined the company and convinced them to quadruple the prices; the result was both an increase in revenue per customer but also an increase in the number of customers. 
• How they evaluated the success of the decision to consolidate the two products into one. 
• How product market fit is a journey, not a destination. 
• How each individual hire can impact the way your product and project is perceived in the world; and it’s important to get alignment on what people are saying. 
• The importance the avoiding confusion among potential customers

***

Are you leading an open source company and struggling with product strategy? I will help you improve the quality of your conversations, so people understand your product sooner, remain more engaged in the conversation and understand the relationship between your product and project. Learn more here. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Robert Hodges, CEO of Altinity. This is a great example of an open source company that is built on top of an open source project, ClickHouse, that they did not create and still do not have direct control over. Altinity has created and maintains other open source projects in the ClickHouse ecosystem as well, but 

So many things to unpack with this episode, but a couple I want to call attention to in particular. 

1. The origin story of how Altinity’s founder discovered Clickhouse (he did not create it!). I love how Robert specifies that Alexander Zaitsev, one of the Altinity co-founders, discovered ClickHouse because he wasn’t happy with how the database he was using scaled — and by the way, it had nothing to do with how much the database cost. Great example of an open source project winning because it provided superior value, not because it was/is free. 
2. Making product strategy decisions based on who the ideal user and the ideal customer is. Robert talked about how Altinity didn’t contribute a particular high-security feature back to open source ClickHouse because while it’s something that very security-conscious organizations would want, for an open source users who doesn’t have major security and compliance requirements it would be confusing and create a worse user experience. 
3. Working in friendly competition with the 10 or so other companies that are building around ClickHouse, and how this is one of the unique things about working around open source
4. How Altinity’s customers tend to value the four freedoms of open source

Are you a leader of an open source company and you’re struggling to prioritize your product roadmap in a way that reinforces your differentiated value… reach out. I help companies figure out the differentiated value of their product and product, where to put the line between the two, and how to use that information to prioritize your roadmap, build a sales narrative and communicate with your market. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jesse Williams and Brad Micklea, co-founders of Jozu and each with a long history of experience in various open source companies behind them. Even though Jozu is young, there was a lot to learn from these two and their experience in both open source and non-open source businesses. We talked about open source and not open source from CodeEnvy, Red Hat, AWS and Docker. 

“It’s very hard to get a sustainable open source project if you don’t have a company behind it paying those developers to work on it.” 

Some things we talked about: 

• Why it’s important to focus on ‘what people get” instead of ‘what you give people.’ This is a fundamental component of effective product strategy and understanding your value prop: You can’t just talk about about the features you’re delivering; you have to connect that and focus on the value that people get from using the product. 
• Jesse talked about the wizard behind the curtain that makes open source projects drive commercial adoption and revenue. 
• You must be able to communicate the additional value of the commercial product; otherwise you will run the company into the group.
• Many open source companies get taken hostage by the open source community and end up having trouble monetizing because they make give away value in a way that is not sustainable.
• Users — and especially customers — are often unwilling to commit to a project if they are not convinced that the business behind it is healthy and has a sustainable business model. 
• Open source, open standards and open governance — the relationship between the three and why we should all talk more about open standards and open governance in the open source ecosystem. 
• The importance of really thinking through why you are open sourcing something, something that many companies don’t think through. 

We wrapped up the conversation talking about how difficult it is to figure out which features to prioritize — and that this is a really hard decision for any startup. This is a big part of my shift to focusing on product strategy in my consulting. If you’re an open source startup struggling with product prioritization and strategy, check out my product strategy offering. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Jimmy Zelinskie, co-founder and CPO of Authzed, which is behind SpiceDB. 

We kicked off the discussion with a really interesting discussion about whether or not SpiceDB is a database and whether or not Authzed is a database company. At first they didn’t see it that way, but as soon as they started leaning in on describing the product as a database, the more successful they were at getting people in their community to quickly understand what they did and how to use it. But it wasn’t just important for adoption: Once the team realized they were a database company, the business model they should follow seemed obvious, and they could make product decisions without stepping on anyone’s toes. 

Some topics we covered: 

• How positioning SpiceDB as a database, and Authzed as a database company, helped everything else fall into place, from growth to product strategy
• Why people often do want to avoid self-managing critical infrastructure
• The difference in ideal user profile and ideal customer profiles
• How transparency is the biggest benefit that Authzed gets from having an open source project. 
• How the decision to release an open source project was a direct consequence of positioning the technology as a database.
• Why it is extremely important to have a decision-making framework for deciding what features will go into the open source or the proprietary features, that is communicated throughout the company
• Why open source companies need to consider the open source users and communities as one of their stakeholders that needs to be represented in strategic discussions

If you’re the founder of an open source company — or you know anyone who is — and you don’t have a good framework for making product decisions or struggle to communicate internally and externally what the difference between project and product is, I can help you figure that out. Here’s more information. 

This week on the Business of Open Source I had Galeal Zino, CEO and founder of NetFoundry, which creates OpenZiti. 

One of the most interesting things about the this conversation was the conversation about how to balance whether you’re promoting the product or the project. I talk to a lot of founders who assume that because you have both, you have to promote both. The same goes for SaaS and onprem options — some people think that just because you offer both, you have to build a go to market function for both. This topic came up in the conversation with Joe Duffy as well — in their case, it was the opposite, though. Pulumi started with both open source and commercial product, but put all the emphasis on the open source project for the first two years. 

Some of the interesting takeaways from this episode: 

• Even though there was no “GTM” focus on the open source project at the beginning, it still had business benefits to NetFoundry, because it made prospects more comfortable that they wouldn’t disappear overnight
• How building an open source company is more difficult, because you end up supporting multiple products. But it also can build a flywheel of innovation that you just can’t get any other way. 
• Do you have to get product market fit twice? We had a long conversation about whether or not you have to get product market fit twice in open source companies. 
• We also talked about testing ideas and business models in the actual market, and how lessons learned in other businesses can influence how you approach you take even with open source companies. 

Thank you for listening! 

PS: I’m changing my consulting offerings slightly, to focus on product strategy instead of positioning. And I’m looking for beta clients while I figure out exactly what the offering looks like. So if you’re an open source company and you’re looking for a clear product vision, a better understanding of how your product + project are differentiated and how to build that into your roadmap, reach out. 

Pretix founder and CEO Raphael Michel has a completely different philosophy about what he is building compared to the big players in the event / ticketing platform space. We had a great conversation this week about Pretix, how Pretix is positioned compared to big players, and who care about the fact that Pretix is an open source company. 

Some takeaways: 

• Pretix is a small company, but Raphael feels like it is able to have a much broader feature set than the big players like Eventbrite
• I think of Pretix and Eventbrite as competitors, but Raphael was able to very easily tell me the difference between Pretix and Eventbrite, how that stems from a different philosophical stance about what they are building
• It took five years for Pretix to hire one person, about 10 years after starting Pretix there’s about 20 people on the team
• About 20% of people care about the fact that Pretix is open source, and 80% don’t care. But those who do care, care a lot. Figuring out who cares about open source and who doesn’t depends on the target market and can be trickier than you would expect. 
• Even though SaaS is the main business model for Pretix, they have an on-prem offer — and they have on-prem customer.
• How growth is a huge challenge, both for the company growing and for the customers and partners, because it becomes more challenging to get support.

Notice how clear Raphael was about Pretix’s positioning, and how it was different from the big players in the event space. Are you that clear on how your software is different from competitors? Do you have a clear point of view, like Raphael, that sets you apart from the rest of the eocsystem? If not, you might want to work with me. 

This week on the The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Ashraf Samhouri, the CEO and co-founder of Activepieces. 

Activepieces didn’t start as an open source company — and we started out the conversation by talking about why it was important to take an open source route because Activepieces is building an ecosystem. 

Some other highlights from the episode: 

• Making software that is both for technical users (engineers love Activepieces!) and non-technical users (who also love Activepieces, because the UI is good)
• Understanding the different user types, and marketing to them separately and specifically. 
• I challenged Ashraf to tell my why Activepieces is better than Zapier even without the open source piece — it was a challenge, but he made a good argument about having a simpler interface as well as that Activepieces allows you to run on-prem
• We talked about product led growth and how there is an obvious starting point for promoting an open source project
• Why lead qualification is so important

If you’re the founder of an open source company and you’re struggling with your open source strategy, with your positioning of your product or project in the ecosystem or with communicating that value of your product and project, reach out — that’s what I help companies with. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Per Ploug Krogslund, who is currently  senior director of developer programs at Docker, and who previously had a number of experiences at the intersection of open source and business. He founded and ran an open source company, Umbraco, for many years, and also led the Open Source Program Office at Spotify. 

We had a wide-ranging conversation about open source businesses. Some of the topics we covered:

• What is the right size for an open source business? How do we make space in the conversation about open source businesses for the companies that will never become billion dollar unicorns? 
• The tension, both internal and external, around building open source software and building a company. We talked about this in the context of Umbraco and in the context of Docker — most fascinating to me was that Per felt like as soon as Umbraco had figured this out, it wasn’t as interesting for him to keep working on the company. 
• Why hasn’t there been an “enterprise Backstage” company to spin out of Spotify? 
• We also revisited the question of Microsoft and open source, because Umbraco is an open source company built on a Microsoft stack at a time when Microsoft was publicly hostile to open source. 

What should you take away from this conversation? 

• There are plenty of opportunities to build small-to-medium size companies around open source
• You might have to try a lot of different ways to monetize. Per said he felt like Umbraco tested 17 different income streams
• There will be a tension, both internally and externally, about how much to open source. This is part of the game; you have to figure out how to manage this tension but might never feel like you get it perfect. 

If you’re listening and want help on your open source strategy, finding the right balance between open source and income streams and figuring out what those income streams should be, reach out to see if it might be a good fit for us to work together. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I talked with Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs. We talked about how he had a 10-month run building a startup before ultimately joining Grafana in an acquisition — why he thought that was the right move at the time and how it’s developed since then. But Tom has also had a long career in open source businesses, and we had plenty to talk about. 

My favorite quote: “I’ve always seen open source as a privilege of successful businesses, so I want to be a successful business.” 

At Kausal, Tom’s first startup, the focus was on financial sustainability from the beginning, and they had $100k in revenue in 10 months before the acquisition by Grafana. At Grafana Labs, everything is done with an eye on revenue — yes, there are tons of open source projects and tons of investment in those projects, but it has to be tied to revenue. 

Some other things we talked about: 

• Starting an open source company with the explicit goal of being a successful business, which is not what Tom sees all open source companies doing
• Why you should probably start with open source code at the beginning if you intend to open source at all, because otherwise your code will get messy and you’ll be too embarrassed to open it
• How integrations are the secret sauce that Grafana Labs monetizes — why that it, and how it allows so much code to stay open source without threatening Grafana’s financial success
• Choosing a SaaS strategy versus choosing an enterprise on-prem strategy — and how you need to be aware of what your competitors are doing when choosing which is right for you. 

Thanks for listening! I’m Emily Omier, a consultant who works with company on open source strategy related to positioning and product management. If you’re struggling with your strategy around open source — whether you’re unsure how to differentiate in the ecosystem or not sure what to open source — I can help. Learn more here. 

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Mike Milinkovich, executive director at the Eclipse Foundation. We had a wide-ranging conversation about the role of open source foundations in the open source ecosystem, especially as related to open source businesses. 

The existence of open source foundations, and how companies decide to engage (or not) with them, is one of the aspects of open source businesses that is truly unique. Perhaps one of the key things to keep in mind from this conversation is that a foundation’s priority is project sustainability — and that is not always aligned with the goal of increasing profits for a company. On the other hand, there are a lot of advantages to contributing a project to a foundation. But founders should be aware of both the advantages and the constraints that working with a foundation entails. 

Here are some of the things that stood out from our conversation: 

• Investors want a successful business more than they want a successful project; foundations’ priorities are opposite. 
• You have to take into account commercial/financial interests if you’re thinking about sustainability of a project, because you have to put food on the table; projects take time to maintain.
• The only community you get around an open source project is the one you build — contributing a project to a foundation is not a magic community pill, and building a community takes work. 
• Running a foundation is not free, so if you’re going to contribute a project to a foundation seriously consider supporting that foundation financially.
• Your customers should also become sponsors or members of the foundation(s) that your project(s) are hosted under, and you should actively encourage them to do so. 

Listen to the entire episode for even more insights! 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Vinoth Chandar, the founder and CEO of Onehouse and the creator of Apache Hudi. We took a pretty deep dive into the relationship between Onehouse and Hudi, a topic that for me is at the heart of building a company on top of an open source project. In fact, whether or not Onehouse is an ‘open source company’ could be debatable; Hudi is an Apache project — it’s not owned by Onehouse in anyway — and Onehouse is not a ‘managed Hudi’ or ‘enterprise Hudi.’ Onehouse solves a problem that is fundamentally not the same problem that Hudi solves. 

Here’s some other take aways from my conversation with Vinoth: 

• There were both technical and business reasons for the relationship between Onehouse and Hudi; Hudi is a library, and you can’t offer a library as a service. Also, Onehouse does way, way more than Hudi.
• Out of Hudi’s 16 project management committee members, 5 are from Onehouse. Which means both that Onehouse has a significant presence, but also that it can’t completely control the project. 
• The disadvantage of being in a ‘hot’ market, which means there are lots of big players trying to define the narrative around data lakehouses.
• Starting Onehouse two and a half too late… or was it actually too early? We had a discussion about timing of starting the company, and Vinoth had arguments for why they started the company too late, but also why it might have been too early. 
• Are you giving away too much? The Onehouse board sometimes thinks so; but what Vinoth thinks was a mistake was not spending enough time educating both Hudi users and the larger community about just how much Hudi can do, instead of letting external players define the narrative about what Hudi does. 

Check out the full episode for more wisdom from Vinoth! 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Joe Duffy, co-founder and CEO of Pulumi.

We kicked off the conversation by talking about why Pulumi is open source in the first place — a mix of Joe’s long-standing interest in open source and a feeling like a developer tool like Pulumi just has to be open source in order to be taken seriously. But there was another reason, too: Pulumi’s founders weren’t just in it to build a company, they wanted to transform their industry and build a lasting community, and felt like open source was the best way to do that. 

Lots of good take aways in this episode, like: 

• Learning from open source legends... uh, actually, learning from Microsoft. Microsoft is an open source giant, right? It’s interesting to hear Joe talk about learning about open source business strategy from Microsoft, precisely because Microsoft does not make money directly from VSCode, and also does not invest millions of dollars into R&D just to be nice. “If you’re going to try to build a business with open source, you need to be very thoughtful and very strategic about it.” 

• The founding team at Pulumi sort of iterated on figuring out the business model, but to a large extent they just thought about it until they had an Aha! moment. On the other hand, they didn’t go public until they thought they had a winning strategy for building an open source business. 

• In the case of Pulumi, there’s a client side and a server side, so it made sense to build in a natural division between the two. This also made it so users were less likely to feel like Pulumi was holding back essential features in order to drive sales. 

• “The way I always view it is the thing you’re selling has to stand on its own” 

• Pulumi started a company, an open source project and a commercial product at the same time. Joe’s not sure he would recommend that approach, but it worked for them. “Figuring out the relationship was importnat, but actually the most important thing was to have a successful open source technology.” 

• One thing I wanted to pull out: Even though Pulumi launched the open source project and commercial product at the same time, they focused all their efforts in the first two to three years on getting the open source project off the ground. Many founders I talk to think that once the commercial product is out there, you are forced to build a GTM team… but you don’t have to. In fact, I think the strategy of having the possibility to buy the commercial product while focusing the company’s energy on the open source software in the beginning is brilliant. Result: “We were able to create this immense funnel of inbound commercial interest, even when that wasn’t really the top level focus.” 

• Even if you’re primarily a SaaS company, you can still offer an enterprise on-prem version for customers with hard requirements to host themselves, like air-gapped environments. Just because that option exists doesn’t mean you must build GTM motion for it, though. 

• The business value Pulumi gets from the open source project is: generating leads, building the company’s brand, and also recruiting top-level talent. 

• The fact that developers building the tool are so close to developers in the community is also a huge advantage. 

Listen to the full episode, it has a huge amount of great insights!

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Tyler Jewell — for the second time, now. Last time I spoke with Tyler, he was an investor at Dell Technologies Capital, he’s since taken over as CEO of Lightbend. 

We talked about a lot, but there was a definite theme to our conversation: License changes. Lightbend had been running an open core model, with the open core using a permissive Apache license. The company’s open source project, Akka, is massively popular. Lightben had about $13 million in ARR. But it was spending over $20 million per year, mostly of on R&D and then GTM. And they had a churn problem; and the churn problem was that customers would stop buying Lightbend’s product, but they would stay with Akka, because it was good enough. 

Why did this happen? The added proprietary features weren’t valuable enough for companies to pay for, especially in the face of budget cuts. And because the community was quite mature, it often started to duplicate these capabilities. And then the company faced a near-death experience in 2021. At the same time, usage of Akka was only growing, while the company was facing potential bankruptcy. Investors saw the potential and didn’t want to give up on the company, but it was clear to the board of directors that something needed to change — and that the thing that wasn’t working was the business model. 

So they changed it. 

There’s a couple things I hope people can take away from this. 

• If the difference in value between your commercial product and your open source project isn’t big enough, you’ll have a rough time building a profitable company. 
• Sometimes the alternative to changing a license is bankruptcy; bankruptcy ultimately is not in anyone’s best interest, not the company, not the community’s, not the customer’s. 
• Offering a cloud option can work, but it’s an entirely different business, and trying to build it up while the company is in a crisis and expecting it to save the company is only realistic if there’s a good overlap between the market for the cloud offering and the open source project; in this case, there wasn’t good overlap. 
• The license options open to you depend on what the actual software does. And if you’re going to enforce the license at all, you need to have some visibility into where it’s installed, which, again, can be challenging depending on what kind of software you’re dealing with. 
• Changing an open source project’s license is not a trivial undertaking. You have to hold copyright to the code, and you better hope that you’re structured your contributor license agreements correctly. You also have to do the change on a new release — and it’s more likely to work if the new version is different enough from the previous one that people really want to update. 
• If you’re going to make a license change, you might get backlash, but if being transparent and honest can go a long way towards minimizing the PR disaster. 
• So what happened? Churn went down, revenue is nearly doubled and Tyler projects that this year will be cashflow positive. 

This summary doesn’t do it full justice, though, so check out the full episode!! 

This week on The Business of Open Source I have an episode I recorded on site at AI-Dev in Paris with Justin Cormack, CTO of Docker. We finally get around to talking about AI at the very end of the episode, but otherwise we talked business and open source and how Docker manages both. Here’s some of the take aways from the episode:

• There are upsides and downsides to being an open source company, and you should absolutely make sure you are leveraging the upsides. Because they don’t necessarily translate into business value automatically, you have to be intentional to make that happen. 
• It’s often a good idea for open source businesses to create a commercial product that is complementary to their project, so that if usage of one goes up usage / adoption of the other goes up, too. This is in contrast to an open core model, where the open source project can easily end up being crippled so that people are incentivized to buy the closed source license. 
• If you want to get to $100million ARR, you can either sell $10 subscriptions to 10 million people or you can sell $100,000 subscriptions to 1,000 people. Both get you to the same revenue number, but the business model is very different. 

We also talked AI and open source, given the event we were at. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Karthik Ranganathan, founder and co-CEO of Yugabyte. This is the second time Karthik has been on the podcast, but since three years had passed I thought it’d be a good idea to catch up and see what’s changed at Yugabyte and how his perspective on the open source commercial ecosystem has changed. 

Some really cool topics came up in this conversation. For example: 

• Why engineers don’t choose databases based on features (and how this is related to why so many databases are open source
   
  • This was super interesting, because I’ve seen a lot of conversations in the developer tools space about how developers choose their tools based on the features the tool has, and you should therefore market/sell based on features (unlike marketing/selling to any other market). I think this is bullshit and based on a misunderstanding about the difference between a feature and a benefit. Going back to the database market, we talked about how ultimately database users need to develop an intuition around when a particular database is the best choice, and that it takes time to do so. 
• Choosing a database is about choosing what to prioritize for a particular application, and in a way Yugabyte presents its users/customers with a way to prioritize what’s important, simplicity or flexibility. Companies that want more simplicity get something that’s fully managed (and pay for it) companies that prioritize flexibility above all else are a better fit for the open source. 
• The database is the same, regardless of whether someone is using the pure open source version or the fully managed service — and it’s important to Yugabyte that everyone gets the same core functionality. 
• How the role of open source and it’s value for Yugabyte as a company has changed as the company has matured, and in particular how it’s a way for people to try out Yugabyte first, and then reach out. 
• Why Yugabyte has invested in making sure the open source user experience is excellent — because they want users to get value out of the project immediately; no one has time to spend four days figuring out how a new database works. This is part of why they think the open source project has become a lead engine. 
• The importance of messaging in helping people understand quickly what to expect from the project and minimizing the amount of time it takes for them to get value out of it. 
• Whether or not Yugabyte was a bit early to the cloud native party, and the pros and cons of being early. 

And much more! 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with André Eriksson, founder and CEO at Encore. We talked about how open source develops trust, something I also discussed in the episode I recorded with Reshma Khilnani. For Encore, it’s subtly different, though. In the case of Medplum, open source is a differentiator in a market that’s used to black boxes, for Encore, open source is tablestakes in a market that won’t adopt a completely proprietary software. 

We talked about: 

• Launching with a cloud platform from day one — not the open source project. 
• On the other hand, open source is also important because often users and customers have to modify things to get it exactly right; the flexibility is a critical part of the platform’s draw. 
• The challenge getting contributions, which André doesn’t find surprising, especially because it’s a project/product that solves problems for companies, not hobby projects. 
• Having one brand for the open source project and the product, which can make it hard to communicate the difference between them. 
• Ensuring that the open source project and all of the features in it are useable without being dependent on the commercial product — which is not always easy. Finding the right balance between avoiding crippleware and still having enough of a difference in value between the open source and the commercial product to sell it is a core challenge. 
• The biggest risks from open source, which André kicked off by talking about the difference between what you perceive as a big risk and what objectively is — this is a distinction that I think is super important to understand in life and business. Ultimately he settled on a big risk just being that you build something that isn’t valuable or differentiated enough for people to pay for. 
• Communicating the value proposition clearly is their top challenge at the moment. 

Check out the full episode for some serious insights into what’s working and what’s a struggle at Encore. 

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Saurav Pathak, chief product officier at Bagisto, about a very different kind of business relationship with open source — and open source software incubated in a larger company. There were tons of interesting nuggets in this episode, but some things I wanted to call out are:

• For open source projects, the tech stack that the project is built with can in fact be a differentiating feature. This is unique to open source (and has come up before, both in my consulting work and in podcast interviews). Users might want to choose a project because it’s written in the language they are familiar with, even if the functionality is exactly the same as a competing project
• The difference in needs between the merchants (who just want to get their ecommerce store up and running) and developers building ecommerce platforms, who was worried about being able to build extensions 
• How an open source company like Bagisto fits into the larger commercial strategy for the parent company. 
• Build a community of developers versus building a community of merchants, and why both are important for a project like Bagisto
• How Saurav manages the tension between adding features that people want and not building an overly bloated product, including how to manage this tension when someone wants to contribute a feature that the core team may or may not want. 

It’s always interesting to me to see different models for open source companies, and Bagisto certainly is a different model. Especially after last week’s episode with Tanmai Gopal, which had a much more classic story. 

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Tanmai Gopal, co-founder of Hasura. We talked about how Hasura grew out of Tanmai’s previous company, which was a consulting company. I like to call out examples of really novel open source businesses, but in fact the thing that stuck with me from the conversation with Tanmai was that Hasura is going the ‘classic’ route… and it’s working. 

What does the ‘classic’ route look like to me? It’s an open source project that targets individual developers and a commercial product that targets teams and teams of teams. It’s having additional network security features in the commercial options. It’s using the open source project as a growth engine and getting leads from companies that depend on it. It’s also using the open source project as a way to get feedback on the product roadmap. 

Here were some of the takeaways from our conversation: 

• It’s a lot easier to sell a product if your customers see it as mission-critical. One of Hasura’s first inbound leads was from a Fortune 100 company who said they’d be unable to ship any software for two weeks if Hasura went down — and so they wanted to make sure the team behind Hasura was serious and also wanted to pay them to make sure they didn’t go down. 
• For Hasura, the first clear difference between open source project and commercial product was that the open source project is for individual developers but the commercial product is aimed at the team level.
• Even for the cloud hosted edition, the product with ‘developer-level’ focus is free. In fact, if you go to the Hasura CE product page, the CTA asks you to use for free on the cloud. Tanmai said this is an intentional choice because they want to reduce friction for people to test it out, and the fastest way to get up and running will always be to use the cloud version, not the open source. 
• We talked a lot about the control plane versus the data plane — all the editions have the same functionality at the data plane level. But the control plane, where people are collaborating — that is commercial only. 
• The open source project can be a great way to stay close to your users / customers and use their feedback to constantly refine your product roadmap. In fact, this can be a main advantage of being open source, because it is the only way you stay close to your users and get their feedback — otherwise you would often only talk to the buyer, who is likely an exec with a big budget but not using the technology on a daily basis. 
• This doesn’t mean open source doesn’t create liabilities for Hasura — it does, and those liabilities have to be managed. And Tanmai is frank about the fact that creating enough value on top of the open source project without crippling the growth engine is a tough balancing act. 
• Pay attention to what your best customers are doing! That has informed some really important product decisions for Hasura — and it took them way to long to figure out the unique way their happiest customers were getting more value out of Hasura than other users. 

Definitely check out the full episode for more insights from Tanmai! 

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Reshma Khilnani, CEO and founder of Medplum. Medplum is an open source electronic health record development platform, and one of the things I loved about this conversation is that Reshma is so focused on the healthcare industry — a level of focus that I find relatively rare in open source companies. And not only that, when I asked her if she thought the company’s focus was too narrow, she responded that actually she often worries that it’s too broad. 

Another thing I really liked about this episode is that open source, for Medplum, is about trust and transparency, not growth. Medplum’s customers, Reshma said, just don’t mess around with free software that doesn’t come with compliance certificates and some kind of support guarantees. It’s a great episode to come on the heels of the episode with Adam Jacob, who talked about the difference between code, software and a product — that is a distinction that Medplum has clearly nailed. 

Other takeaways if you’re running an open source company: 

• Reshma is clearly really passionate not just about developing software, but about building software for the healthcare industry. She can also clearly articulate why her customers are not well served by the standard, off the shelf development platforms that can be used by any industry. This industry-specific expertise is really powerful, and quite frankly something I don’t encounter very often. 
• Even though there are different legal regimes in different countries, the underlying needs are pretty similar, so even for something as specific as healthcare companies it’s not particularly challenging to provide a solution that meets the needs of customers around the world
• Medplum is Reshma’s third company, but her first open source company. She talked about how one of the key differences between building an open source company and a her previous companies that that the company has to pay incredible attention to the implementation details that at any other company no one would care about. 
• Yes, you’re building a product company… but that doesn’t mean you should never sell professional services. Reshma says that one mistake she made was being too rigid about not selling any professional services at all, and ultimately they ended up offering packages of services to help customers get their implementations running. 

One last bit of info: Reshma compared the conversation around open source startups now with “internet startups’ in 2013. Will all startups be open source startups in 10 years? I guess we’ll see. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Adam Jacob, founder and CEO of System Initiative and formerly the CTO and co-founder at Chef. We had a wide-ranging conversation that at times veered into the philosophical (what is the meaning for ‘strategy’?) but also has plenty of concrete, practical insights. 

We talked about:

• The difference between being the CTO and being the CEO of a startup, even if you’re a founder in both cases (and why Adam wanted to try out the CEO role this time)
• How Chef started out open source primarily because Adam and his co-founder really believed in open source values 
• How they figured out a business model for Chef, but that it really felt like they were just making it up was they went along — and how he suspects that’s what most people do
• Getting disrupted four times, and trying out many different business models along the way
• We also talked a lot about total addressable markets, serviceable available market and serviceable obtainable market in the context of open source companies. 

Three key takeaways: 

• The software is not the product. A product is the entire experience of using the software, including how it is installed, how the team is onboarded, what compliance certifications you have, what happens if you have a problem, etc. As a vendor of open source software, you need to focus on creating and selling a whole product and take the focus away from the code. 
• You can have 100% open source code and still sell a product, because they want to have a complete experience with support and compliance paperwork etc — and because they value buying those things from the same people who are writing the code. 
• The way to calculate TAM is to multiply the number of people who want to buy a product by the average selling price of the product. When you phrase it this way, it becomes obvious that the TAM for any open source software is zero, because the average selling price is zero. 

If you enjoy this podcast, please share with other founders and leadership in open source companies! 

And if you like the idea of open source lawyer trading cards, reach out to Adam and he’ll start a physical product company next :). 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I had a very different sort of guest — Mark Boost, the CEO and founder of Civo. We talked not only about Mark’s history as an entrepreneur, but also Civo’s recent acquisition of KubeFirst. This topic caught my eye because it’s not often I get an offer to talk with an acquirer of open source companies, and I wanted to take him up on it. (Though if you missed it, I also talked to Thomas di Giacomo about this topic, and it was fabulous). The that is different about this case is that Suse is fundamentally an open source company, but Civo is not, and this was the first time that Civo had acquired an open source company. 

We talked about:

• How the relationship started long before anyone was thinking about an acquisition
• What the 1 + 1 = 3 equation looked like in this particular case
• How it makes sense for an infrastructure company to acquire a complementary software company 
• What it means to hire a pre-revenue open source company
• It’s a relatively new acquisition, so we did a pre-mortem on it together, and Mark talked about what could go wrong — a super interesting process. 
• Lastly, we talked about Civo’s open source projects and what business value the company gets out of it’s relationship with open source in general

Come join me at Open Source Founders Summit if you want more conversations about building open source companies! 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Brian Fox, co-founder and CTO of Sonatype. In addition to having a really interesting discussion about the usual topic of how to build a business around open source software, we also had a good conversation about security — it was hard to avoid, because we recorded this right after the xz backdoor discovery, and software supply chain security is kind of Brian’s thing. 

Business-wise, though, we also covered some really cool topics. Including: 

• The tension between an open source project that’s “too good” and yet the need for the sales team to close deals
• In some ways, the fully commercial, closed-source products in Sonatype’s product line are more straightforward… but there are challenges that go along with a pure closed-source approach, too, especially for a DevTool company. 
• Choosing your relationship with open source depending on who your target user / target buyer is
• Pivoting to a top-down sales motion because the bottoms-up motion just didn’t work; and how that means the features that sell aren’t always the features that get used
• What Sonatype gets out of it’s relationship with Apache Maven and open source Nexus
• How do we solve real problems, and how do we solve them for real? Keeping in mind that no one buys what they need; they only buy what they want. 

Check out the full episode, and come to Open Source Founders Summit if you want more opportunities to talk about about business and open source. 

This week on The Business of Open Source I had Rod Johnson, founder/CEO of Spring Source and creator of the Spring Framework (as well as board member of many other open source companies) on to talk about Spring, monetizing open source and what’s changed in the open source ecosystem since 2008. 

Key takeaways:

• Consulting was burning the entire team out, and that threatened the health not just of the consulting business, but of the open source project as well
• An amazing salesperson can often sell anything, but that doesn’t mean that you’ll be able scale, because your entire sales team is not likely to be incredibly brilliant 
• Spring Source ended up not monetizing Spring at all — but rather worked on monetizing with products that were complementary to Spring. “We monetized Spring by not monetizing Spring, by using it to open the door” 
• The moment that the company really started to see success as a product company was when the team stopped thinking about what they wanted to build and instead focused on what customers where telling them that they wanted.
• The risk of having a bunch of very good engineers on your team is that they’re excited about solving hard technical problems — but your customers might want something that is not very technically challenging or interesting. 
• A major part of the job of a company leader is to talk to your team and get them on board with your plans 
• The environment around monetizing open source projects has changed — there are things that worked in 2008 that wouldn’t work today, and things that didn’t work then that would be fine now
• If you love (insert your favorite open source project here), it has to have a sustainable economic model
• It’s really critical to have a rationale behind what functionality goes in your product and what goes into your open source project

At the end we talked briefly about Open Source Founders Summit, a conference for leaders in open source businesses happening this May 27th and 28th in Paris. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with BoxyHQ co-founder and CEO Deepak Prabhakara. We talked about a number of things, from BoxyHQ’s relationship with its open source project, called SAML Jackson to how to build a growth flywheel and how that flywheel does and does not depend on a community. 

• Is BoxyHQ a security company? Does it matter either way? 
• Starting the open source project at the same time as the company, and why they did it that way
• The relationship between the user community and the customer community
• BoxyHQ as the anti-platform — instead of trying to build a platform, which is the default goal for a lot of companies I speak with — they are explicitly trying to build a more a la carte experience for users
• The challenges of community building around a project that isn’t sexy and how to build community that isn’t project-focused, but rather that’s focused around a problem space
• Making the mistake of assuming your startup is completely unique and unlike any others! 

We talked about much more as well, and it’s definitely an episode you should check out. 

In the second episode that I recorded on-site at KubeCon EU in Paris, I spoke with Alex Olivier, CPO and co-founder of Cerbos. This was not a general discussion: It was focused on the process that Cerbos went through to figure out pricing. 

Here’s what we talked about:

• The first step of figuring out your pricing is not the number, but rather what you’re charging for. Is it API calls, or amount of data you’re processing, or monthly active users, or monthly active principles… that last one is what Cerbos is charging for
• Why it’s important to have a pricing system that allows potential users to be able to roughly estimate for themselves how much using your software is going to cost them
• You also want to avoid pricing models that encourage people to look for ways to hack around to find ways to lower their monthly costs
• Why your pricing model should be about the value you’re providing, not about how much it costs you to run your system
• Discovering what your price anchors are / what your customers are comparing you to

Check out the full episode for more details! 

And join us at Open Source Founders Summit for more discussions about the specifics of pricing for open source companies. 

This week, I had a dilemma: should I prioritize the episode where I spoke with one of the MariaDB co-founders, in which we discuss setting up a foundation as a way to ensure that the project continues to be open source in the future, no matter what (relevant given the Redis announcement); or should I prioritize the conversation with one of the founders of Sonatype, one of the oldest companies in the software supply chain security space, in which we talk about the xz debacle. 

I went with Patrick Backman, general partner at OpenOcean and co-founder of MariaDB, because it’s a little more in my lane. (The conversation with Brian Fox will have to wait for next week!). 

One of the main things we discussed was the relationship between the MariaDB foundation and the MariaDB company. Including: 

• Why they decided to put MariaDB open source in a foundation, and why they created a separate foundation instead of putting it in an existing foundation 
• The relationship between MariaDB foundation and company today, including the financial relationship

MariaDB was founded by the founders (and some key employees) at MySQL; we also discussed the lessons learned at MySQL that the team then applied at MariaDB. And we talked about customer acquisition, one of the things that Patrick thinks the team had learned at MySQL and therefore had pretty well figured it out at MariaDB. 

Patrick’s co-founder Monty Widenius is one of the speakers at Open Source Founders Summit — if you want to go into more details on with the lessons from MySQL and MariaDB, as well as lessons from being an investor at OpenOcean, join us in Paris May 27th and 28th at Open source Founders Summit. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have an episode recorded on site at KubeCon EU in Paris with William Morgan, CEO of Buoyant. We had a fabulous conversation, which touched on some touchy subjects, including Buoyant’s slightly changing relationship with Linkerd. But we talked about:

• Being an open source mercenary, but also being dedicated to making Linkerd a ‘proper’ open source project
• Feeling like open source was table stakes for a company in the space Buoyant plays in. This is an under-appreciated reason for being an open source company — you feel like it’s just expected in the market you play in, so you do. 
• Waiting too long (or is it too long?) to commercialize
• Starting out by selling support, but the problem with that because Linkerd worked well and people kept saying that they didn’t need support because they never had problems
• Competing against Istio, which was backed by the Google engine and how that made Linkerd / Buoyant an underdog (or cockroach). 
• For those of you who haven’t been following Linkerd / Buoyant… Buoyant recently announced that they would be doing edge releases for Linkerd, but not stable releases. We talked about why they made this change and how the ecosystem responded. 

Check out the full episode! 

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked to Heather Meeker, General Partner of OSS Capital and author of From Project to Profit, How to Build a Business around your Open Source Project. We talked about some things that I entirely agree with, and then there were some points I challenged Heather on — all in all, it was fabulous conversation. 

Here’s what we covered:

• Why you should think of your project and product as two different products so you avoid thinking of your open source project as a loss leader and get your incentives right
• The differences between supplementary and complementary products, and how the relationship between project and product is often complementary, even in situations where that relationship is non-obvious
• We disagreed about pricing — should COSS businesses have cheaper products than closed-source companies? 
• Why cares about your being open source? 
• Are open source companies more capital efficient? Heather says so, but I’m not convinced. 
• Heather also talked about how they select companies to invest in
• Do open source companies by definition do a better job at paying attention to user / customer demand? 

Check out the episode, and check out more about Heather Meeker here: 

Personal website

OSS Capital

LinkedIn

This week on The Business of Open Source I spoke with Pranay Prateek, co-founder of SigNoz. Pranay talked about why open source is important to SigNoz's business, why it's super important to deliver value quickly, even for an observability product, and why founders shouldn't think of open source just as a distribution model. 

We also covered: 

• How SigNoz is differentiated in the crowded observability market
• Why Pranay thinks being open source makes it much easier for developers to play around with the project and get to know it; so for them it made intuitive sense that the company that they’d build an open source company 
• Why Pranay also thinks open source enables much deeper integrations, which is critically important for an observability company like SigNoz
• How one of their first lessons / mistakes was releasing an open source project that didn’t work well on an individual developer’s laptop, because it used too much resources
• The GTM market, and the challenge delivering value within 30 minutes of trying out the project/product for an observability tool that provides maximum value during an incident — but no one is going to be trying out a new tool during an incident situation 
• Why their first commercial product was a cloud offering

And much more! 

And if you’re interested in more discussions of open source businesses, make sure to join us at Open Source Founders Summit this May. 

In this special episode to promote Open Source Founders Summit, I went deep with Thomas di Giacomo about how open source companies can position themselves as attractive acquisition targets for strategic buyers. 

If you are the founder of an open source company and you have the idea of being acquired even in the back of your mind, this is a must-listen episode. Whether or not you plan to join us May 27th and 28th in Paris, though of course we hope you do join us. 

By the way, at OSFS Thomas is going to lead a workshop on the topic of being an acquisition target for open source companies. It will be interactive, which means you can ASK QUESTIONS. 

In this podcast episode, he talked about: 

• Exits 101. You probably know that strategic buyers usually pay more for companies than other types of acquirers, but we talked about different exit strategies and what they entail
• Why strategic buyers acquire businesses (in general) but also why you, as the business seller, need to understand every specific potential acquirer’s story and goals so you can see how your company fits into their strategic plan
• Strategic acquisitions are about 1+1=3… so you have to know what your buyer’s “3” is
• Why it’s important to be self-aware and know your own goals before you sign any acquisition paperwork

And tons more… 

If you want the chance to ask Thomas about strategic acquisitions for OSS companies — as well as to talk about sales strategies, lead generation and more — join us at OSFS 24 in Paris this May 27th and 28th. —> Get your invite here. 

PS the audio was a little quiet, but so if you’re having trouble hearing turn up the volume, it’s worth it. 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Zach Wasserman, co-founder and CTO of Fleet. This was a fabulous episode for many reasons, but then again I never do crappy episodes, right? 

The first thing I wanted to call your attention to is that Zach talked about how he’s building an open core business because building an open source business is what he wants to do. When his previous company turned away from open source, Zach left to do consulting around OSquery and Fleet (the project). I always like to talk about how companies / founders need a solid reason for building an open source company… and “this is the kind of company I want to build” is a very good reason. (“Everyone else is doing it” on the other hand, is not a good reason). Everyone puts constraints around the type of company the want to build, and as long as you are intentionally about the decisions, there is nothing wrong about this, business-wise.

Second, we talked about the tension that exists between making a great project and still leaving room for a commercial product that people will pay for, and Zach talked through how Fleet uses a buyer-based open core strategy to decide which functionality to put in the enterprise version or in the open core. 

We also talked about:

• Leaving his first company, Kolide, when the founders had divergent visions about where the company should go
• How his investor arranged a ‘co-founder marriage’ for Zach and his co-founder Mike McNeil
• How the transparency aspect of open source can be extremely important, especially for anything in the security space

Lastly, Fleet happens to be a former client of mine. You can check out what Mike, Zach’s co-founder, said about working with me here. 

And if you’re interested in more conversations like this… but in person!!! you should come to Open Source Founders Summit May 27th and 28th in Paris. 

Slightly different The Business of Open Source episode today! I spoke with Patrick McFadin and Mick Semb Wever about the relationship between Apache Cassandra and DataStax — how it was at the beginning and how the relationship has evolved over the years. 

We talked about:

— How there was a dynamic around Cassandra where many of the many of the contributors ended up being sucked into the DataStax orbit, simply because it allowed those contributors to work on on Cassandra full-time

— How there can be tensions between different stakeholders simply because everyone involved ultimately has their own interests at heart, and those interests are not always aligned. 

— How it is actually hard to really have open discussions about new features, and how often there can be a new feature dropped in a project that clearly had been developed behind closed doors for some time, and sometimes that created tension in the community

— Some open source projects are just too complex to be hobby projects — Cassandra is so complex that you won’t become a code contributor unless you’re working full-time on Cassandra, because that’s the level of skill you need to keep up. 

— How the relationship between a company and a project often changes as the technology matures. 

— The importance of addressing tensions between company and community head-on, as adults, when they occur — as well as why you need to remember to treat people as humans and remember that they have good days, bad days, goals and interests. 

Patrick on LinkedIn

Mick on LinkedIn

In this episode of the Open Source Founders Podcast, I talked with Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud. Frank is going to be talking specifically about lead generation at Open Source Founders Summit, but in this episode we took a slightly wider view and talked about go to market, for open source companies in general and specifically for Frank’s experience at Nextcloud. 

A couple other things to pull out as takeaways. 

First of all, Frank talks about how he originally planned to target big companies who wanted to keep their data private — but as it turned out, most big companies don’t really care deeply about keeping their data private. On the other hand, the public sector and universities really do care, and those have ended up being a huge part of Nextcloud’s customers. 

Frank also talked about the rather obvious differences in needs between home users and big organizations. Nextcloud has some customers with millions of users — their needs are different from a home user. And as far as home users go, Frank says these users are obviously never going to pay Nextcloud anything. On the other hand, they have built mechanisms into the software to nudge open source instances with over 1,000 users to get in touch to talk about a commercial relationship. 

He also talked specifically about the importance of really talking with your customers and your users — and incorporating their feedback into your product roadmap. For open source companies, you have so much more information and feedback than proprietary companies, and you should take advantage of that to inform your go to market strategy. 

We also talked about how the millions of home users who will never pay Nextcloud are still extremely valuable to the company — and why Frank think it’s really wrong to think of pure open source users as just leads to be converted. 

And much, much more. 

If you’re the founder or leader at an open source company, and you want to be a part of more discussions like this, join us at Open Source Founders Summit May 27th and 28th in Paris! 

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Percona CEO Ann Schlemmer. This episode was recorded on site at State of Open Con in London, outside in a van! 

There’s a ton of great info in this episode, too. First of all, Ann talked about being a ‘suit’ in a geek’s world and her career trajectory that led her to lead Percona. She also set the stage around the constraints that Percona has chosen for itself: To be completely open source and only sell services, and to be completely bootstrapped. And what the ramifications of those decisions are for the business. 

Here’s some concrete takeaways:

• The key to thinking about managing the tension between creating a project that’s high quality and still being able to sell services on top of that is to ensure that the services really create value
• There’s a difference in profile between happy anonymous users and happy customers — often customers are operating at scale or are working in companies that simply always have to have support for critical software. But just as importantly, customers are often not database experts —they just need a database that works, and can turn to Percona to be their database experts. 
• Founders are often more emotionally attached to aspects of the company that a non-founder CEOs like Ann can sometimes be more analytical about what’s working and what isn’t
• Collaboration isn’t automatic, and how to make it actually happen
• How Ann decides what problems to collaborate with others on, what they don’t collaborate on and when in the project / feature lifecycle they look for collaboration

We also had a bit of a random conversation about controlling status in relationships — the book we talked is Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre. And talked about how founders who are ready to step down as CEO can find a replacement and manage the transition. 

Ann’s links:

LinkedIn

Percona 

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with four-time entrepreneur Mike Schwartz, CEO and founder of Gluu as well as the host of Open Source Underdogs podcast, about his long career in entrepreneurship. Here’s some particularly interesting things to take out of this episode:

• “Beware an entrepreneur’s second company.” — Mike says his second company was a disaster because he tried to apply the lessons from the first company in the second, and often those lessons aren’t right for the new business
• Going all in on being a product company — the toughest year in Gluu’s history was when they decided to stop consulting and make it or break it as a product company
• Why it’s a good idea to look at the market analytically and start a company in a market you’ll be able to compete in without a huge number of features
• Why Gluu actually has more features in the open source version than the enterprise edition — because the open source distribution gets features that are in beta whereas the enterprise customers need a product that is 100% fully baked. 
• Why Mike doesn’t believe in making the enterprise product more ‘scaleable’ — the open source project should be just as scaleable as the enterprise product

This episode was recorded on site at State of Open Con 24, outside in a media van! 

As part of the preparation for Open Source Founders Summit, I’m interviewing both our speakers and our attendees for a special podcast that’s hyper focused on one thing. In this episode I spoke with Peter Zaitsev, founder of Percona, about sales. We talked about the specifics of sales as a bootstrapped company — which means sales are exceptionally critical from the beginning, and how sales changed as the company moved from a consulting model to a support model on the open source software that Percona creates. 

Also, this episode was recorded on site at OpenUK’s State of Open Con! 

Here’s the concrete takeaways from this episode: 

• Even before starting the company, Peter had built up a personal brand as a MySql expert — this is what made it possible for him to get consulting gigs pretty much immediately
• Peter’s personal brand wasn’t just around MySql in general, but was very specifically focused on MySql performance optimization
• How a growing team meant that the sales process had to get much more disciplined — and deal sizes had to get bigger so that it’s worth the sales team’s time 
• How to align sales incentives with your business goals — how it’s important to adjust sales quotas and incentives so that sales people don’t oversell, which can hurt your reputation long-term, and don’t sell long-term agreements at too much of a discount. 
• Why it’s important to separate out your revenue that comes from new customers and your revenue that comes from customer renewals, and how to do so in the organization

If you want more opportunities to go in-depth on sales for open source companies — and to discuss sales and other aspects of business development with other founders, join us May 27th and 28th in Paris at Open Source Founders Summit. 

Garima Kapoor, COO and co-founder of MinIO, joins me to share her journey from investor and advisor to co-founder of MinIO and the wealth of knowledge she’s amassed along the way. 

In this episode, Garima explains how her experience in finance and belief in the power of open source helped MinIO to break into the data storage market. She also reviews the challenges she faced as a first-time founder and what others can learn from her mistakes and take away from some of their own. Since Garima started her journey with MinIO as CFO, she outlines that role for me and explains how she thinks a CFO should operate in an open source company. In reviewing mistakes she’s seen from other founders, Garima states some principles that create the “foundation for any open source business.”  - “You should always be very honest to your community. You should always be very transparent to the community”

Highlights:

• Garima introduces herself and explains why she and her co-founders started MinIO (1:31)
• Garima describes how the MinIO founders honed in on a problem they wanted to solve (3:55)
• How the MinIO founders used open source crack the market (6:37)
• What triggers a user to purchase a commercial license for the product (10:33)
• Garima explains why she and her cofounders were set on their open source strategy from day one (11:35)
• Garima explores the differences between being an investor and advisor for other companies and starting her own. (13:25)
• Garima shares go-to-market advice for other founders (15:21)
• Garima outlines her strategy for building on small successes (18:38)
• Garima explains why she started as CFO for MinIO and breaks down the role a CFO can play in a new company (21:46)
• Why Garima thinks a CFO’s role remains the same in an open source company as compared to a proprietary company (27:17)
• How to avoid competing with your open source product when you also have a commercial offering (34:06)

Links:

Garima

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garimakap/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/garimakap
• Company: min.io

Today I’m joined by Federico Wengi, who is a Partner at SquareOne VC. In this conversation, Federico sheds light on the conversations he’s had with many companies who consider making the pivot from a closed-source business strategy to an open-source strategy. Federico explains why it’s so uncommon for businesses to make that pivot, and lays out the challenges businesses face when they consider taking on such a change. Federico also gives a great example of a company that did successfully complete the pivot to open source, and the choices they made that led to their success. Federico and I discuss why this is one pivot you can’t take back, and also why it won’t solve all your problems. Despite all that, Federico shares his optimism for the value of open source and the importance of at least considering this strategy when you need to make a change. 

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00)
• I introduce Federico, who is a Partner at SquareOne (00:59)
• Federico describes his role at SquareOne and the areas of investment they focus on (01:28)
• What Federico typically sees when companies move from closed source to open source (04:42)
• How important conversations come up about business strategy and open source versus closed source (07:40)
• Why many companies end up not pursuing an open-source strategy (11:17)
• Federico tells the story of a company he worked with that made the leap from closed source to open source (15:03)
• The most critical things businesses have to do in order to utilize an open-source strategy (16:23)
• What decisions led to success in the company Federico helped shift from closed source to open source (18:09)
• The psychological challenges leaders face when considering making a pivot to open source (23:54)
• Federico shares the advice he would give to a founder who’s considering an open-source strategy (26:40)
• How you can connect with Federico (31:40)

Links:

Federico

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/federicowengi/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/federicowengi
• Company: https://squareone.vc/

How can we get founders of open source companies together to share ideas, share strategies and tactics and build a community not just of open source practitioners, but of open source business owners? We create a conference/summit/retreat to bring them together to learn and to work on their businesses together. At least that is the bet that Remy Bertot and I are making

In this episode, I talked with Remy about Open Source Founders Summit, a summit they're organizing on May 27th and 28th, 2024 in Paris, France — we each shared our motivations for organizing the event, and talked about why we think it's important for people to come together in person.

You should listen to the episode, but if you don't want to, the bottom line is that we think there needs to be a space for all open source founders (not just the DevTools, not just the VC-backed) can come together to share business ideas — a place where business, not tech, is the focus. 

Listen to the episode, and join us in May! 

Ben Haynes, the Founder and CEO of Directus, created an open-source project while working at his own agency in 2004. In this episode, we explore how he went from maintaining an open-source project to building an open-source company with a solid product-led growth strategy, and how he’s achieved success in the enterprise segment even as a small organization. Ben expands on how he feels open-source is the best way to start a business, and also reveals why timing and transparency can be both your greatest assets and the areas where you have the most regrets if not done right. We also discuss the value of optimizing you product and business for working with government agencies as an open-source company. 

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00)
• I introduce Ben Haynes, who is the CEO and Founder of Directus (00:59)
• How the Directus platform has evolved over time (02:33)
• Ben tells the story of what happened after the initial release of the Directus project in 2004 (06:06)
• The strategy Directus has used to land enterprise customers as a small company (10:20)
• Ben and I discuss the importance of early-stage open-source companies optimizing to work with government agencies (13:59)
• Ben describes the SaaS business model that he chose for Directus (16:38)
• Why Ben feels that open-source is the best strategy for starting a company (25:19)
• How Ben landed on a product-led growth strategy for Directus (27:39)
• What Ben learned about mistakes he made in timing his product and company (31:23)
• The advice Ben would give to another open-source founder (33:52)
• How listeners can learn more about Directus and connect with Ben (39:32)

Links:

Ben

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/contactbenhaynes/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/benhaynes
• Company: https://directus.io/

Peer Richelsen is the Co-founder of Cal.com, an open-source calendar scheduling tool. This week, Peer and I discuss his personal experience with needing a customizable scheduling tool, the big leap from taking donations to running a profitable business, and the thought process behind seeking VC funding. Peer also talks about the major advantage of starting with only a paid version of the product in order to build a small community of super users. Lastly, I pick Peer’s brain about how he feels being constantly compared to non open-source scheduling products.

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00) 
• I introduce Peer Richelsen, the Co-founder of Cal.com, and he discusses the company and its calendar scheduling tool (00:59)
• Does Peer think about Cal.com as a dev tool (2:09)
• What is Cal.com’s business model (03:57)
• The lack of customizability in the scheduling tool marketplace (06:15)
• Switching from accepting donations to selling a profitable product (09:48)
• Launching without a free version (12:50)
• The human cost of freemium usage (16:20)
• The decision to raise VC funds (17:41)
• What business value being open source brings to the company (20:48)
• How Cal.com positions itself in the market (24:13)
• Interesting mistakes Peer has made as an entrepreneur (28:22)
• How “free” is the software (30:57)
• Peer’s parting words (32:27)
• Where listeners can connect with Peer and learn more about Cal.com (33:04)

Links:

Peer

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peer-richelsen-221233138/
• Twitter: @peer_rich
• Company: https://cal.com/

Birthe Lindenthal is the Co-founder and CMO of OpenProject, a web-based project management system. On this episode, Birthe and I discuss the inception of the company, how being open source directly benefits both the business and its customers, and why the connection to their community is so strong. Plus, Birthe talks about the motivation she feels when contributing to something larger than herself, including the joy of knowing NGOs use her product for free. We also discuss the unique challenges of marketing an open-source product. 

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00)
• I introduce Birthe Lindenthal, the Co-founder and CMO of OpenProject, and she gives us her background along with the company’s history (00:59)
• How OpenProject used custom developments to fund the business (02:42)
• The pros and cons of not taking VC funding (04:15)
• Ways in which being open source benefit the business and the customers (06:09)
• How OpenProject was able to monetize the user base (08:34)
• The division of revenue and users between on-prem and cloud versions of the software (10:24)
• Who are OpenProject’s customers and users (13:57)
• The most interesting mistakes Birthe made along the way (16:44)
• Merging branding between the free and paid versions (18:52)
• Why Birthe got involved with open source (22:38)
• Marketing challenges and strategies specific to an open-source product (24:47)
• The surprising difficulty of creating a glossary of company terminology (29:11)
• Birthe’s advice for founders of open-source companies (31:02)
• Where listeners can connect with Birthe and learn more about OpenProject (32:05)

Links:

Birthe

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/birthe-lindenthal/
• Company: https://www.openproject.org/

Didier Lopes, Co-founder and CEO of OpenBB, joins me to share the story of how OpenBB went from receiving 4000 GitHub stars in the first 24 hours of the project to a fully funded company launching new monetization initiatives. 

Didier and I chat about his background, what led him to start OpenBB in his spare time, and his vision for the company's future. He shares the story of teaming up with his co-founder, why he loves working in the open source ecosystem, and how his team continues contributing to OpenBB's success. 

Highlights:

• Didier introduces himself and recounts his background and what led him to start OpenBB (1:20)
• Why Didier didn't know OpenBB would become a business when he started the project (6:47)
• Didier affirms my thought that part of what makes OpneBB's origin interesting is that the idea was unrelated to his day job. (10:13)
• Didier tells the story of how his co-founder, James, came on board once the project went viral (16:36)
• How OpenBB has changed since the project began (19:16)
• How open source has shaped the development of OpenBB (21:35)
• Didier outlines the current monetization plans for OpenBB (24:44)
• Didier's vision for the future of OpenBB and the democratization of investment research (26:30)
• What Didier learned from his most interesting mistake - believing users know what they want. (29:45)
• Didier emphasizes the importance of building a cohesive team with shared values (32:58)

Links:

Didier

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/didier-lopes/
• Twitter: @didier_lopes
• Company: http://openbb.co
• Personal Site: https://didierlopes.com

Loris Degioanni is the CEO and Founder of Sysdig, an open-source company working to make cloud deployment more secure through the use of runtime insights. Loris and I sit down to discuss the bet Sysdig is making to position itself as a leader in cloud security, how Loris leverages the power of a useful tool to create a brand, and the framework he uses to decide what should be open source and what should be paid for. Loris also shares an in-depth history of his previous company, Wireshark, and his excitement for building open source projects that outlast their business and creators.

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00)
• I introduce Loris Degioanni who is the CEO and Founder of Sysdig, and he provides a little bit of context about himself and his company (01:00)
• Loris gives an overview of his previous company, Wireshark (01:57)
• Ways in which Loris was able to commercialize Wireshark as a tool for open-source end-users (04:30)
• How Loris used open-source as a marketing tool to create a profitable business model (07:28)
• The difference between Sysdig and Wireshark in their relationship to open-source (08:57)
• The bet that Sysdig is making and how that positions the company to become a leader in cloud security (12:36)
• Loris and I discuss Wireshark’s continued longevity (15:14)
• Where the inspiration for Sysdig came from and its journey from open-source project to commercial product (19:41)
• How building something useful replaces the need for a sales and marketing team (24:22)
• Closing the gap between the Sysdig project and the Sysdig platform (27:52)
• The framework for deciding what is offered open-source and what needs to be paid for (30:21)
• Loris’s most interesting mistakes in entrepreneurship and building Sysdig (33:20)
• How listeners can connect with Loris and learn more about Falco and Sysdig (36:31)

Links:

Loris

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/degio/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lorisdegio
• Company: https://sysdig.com/

Bob van Luijt is the CEO and Founder of Weaviate, an open-source vector database company that helps contribute to the advancement of AI technology. Throughout this episode, Bob and I discuss the complexities of moving from an open-source project to building an open-source company, and the challenges that come with monetization strategies. Bob shares insightful anecdotes around why it’s important to be careful that you’re measuring the right things for the right reasons, and also emphasizes the importance of determining the best approach to profitability.  

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00)
• I introduce Bob van Luijt who is the CEO and Founder of Weaviate, and he provides a little bit of context about himself and his company (01:00)
• Bob gives us the run-down on Weaviate’s operations, including fundraising, staffing, and monetization data (02:04)
• How the Weaviate project became the company it is today (04:03)
• The value that open-source brings to Weaviate’s business model (11:21)
• Bob and I discuss the disadvantages to building a company around an open-source project (17:55)
• The complexities of having an open-source project that is used within other companies and products/projects (20:19)
• How Bob and Weaviate have approached monetization (22:18)
• The most interesting mistakes Bob feels he’s made along the way in his journey to build Weaviate (24:37)
• Bob tells us more about his decision to shift from professional services to a product-led approach (25:50)
• Bob and I discuss the complex catch-22 of focusing on either profitability or growth as an open-source founder (28:39)
• How Bob filtered through product feedback and feature requests when first shifting to a product-led approach (32:19)
• Bob’s advice to people who want to be a part of the open-source ecosystem (37:54)
• How listeners can connect with Bob and learn more about Weaviate (39:13)

Links:

Bob

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bobvanluijt/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bobvanluijt
• Company: https://weaviate.io/

Ben Rometsch is the CEO and Founder of Flagsmith, an open-source feature flagging platform. In this conversation, we explore how he landed on the idea to develop an open-source feature flagging project and how that has snowballed into running a full-time SaaS company. Ben describes the challenges of creating a SaaS company from the ground up, especially when it comes to pricing and monetizing. We also discuss the importance of understanding and choosing the right licensing for your product.

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00)
• I introduce Ben Rometsch, who is the CEO of Flagsmith, a commercial open-source feature flagging and remote conflict platform (01:00)
• What made Ben want to build an open-source feature flagging project (01:29)
• How the open-source project Ben started led to building a company around Flagsmith (03:39)
• Why Ben feels licenses are so important and how he learned that through early licensing choices at Flagsmith (09:10)
• When Ben started to monetize Flagsmith (13:24)
• How Ben’s understanding of what features users wanted to pay for has evolved (15:36)
• Why caring about the developer experience has set Flagsmith apart for enterprise customers (20:51)
• When revenue started to take off and why it took external expertise (23:12)
• Why pricing can be such a frustrating challenge to get right (26:47)
• How Flagsmith is currently remotely structured (28:57)
• Ben shares his thoughts on how open source contributes to his business (33:04)
• How listeners can connect with Ben and learn more about Flagsmith (38:05)

Links:

Ben

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benrometsch/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ben_rometsch
• Company: https://www.flagsmith.com/

Max Howell is the CEO of Tea, a revolutionary open-source project that is seeking to help open-source contributors get paid for their work through crypto. Throughout our conversation, Max explains how he’s created some prolific open-source projects but was still unable to monetize them to the point where open source could be his full-time job, and how that provided the inspiration for Tea. Max and I discuss the importance of re-framing open-source projects in business terms of value, and not simply referring to supporting projects as charity work, and Max also shares valuable insights into the world of open-source crypto development. 

Highlights:

• Intro (00:00)
• I introduce Max, the CEO of tea.xyz, and he explains his career background and how he started Tea (01:00)
• Max and I discuss the shift that open source needs to make from relying on charity to speaking in business and value terms (09:39)
• Max describes how Tea is representing the existing value of open source and translating it into monetary form (12:32)
• The administrative challenges of paying for open-source tools that are business-critical and how Tea helps solve them (14:36)
• Tea’s business strategy for monetizing their own open-source project (18:05)
• How Max’s goal of being able to work on the open-source projects he loves full time has played out with Tea (24:06)
• Max describes how he successfully pitched Tea to investors (25:21)
• Tea’s relationship with the rest of the crypto industry (27:32)
• The biggest challenge Max and his team are working on at the moment (29:06)
• What Max wishes he would have done differently and what he’s learned from the mistakes he’s made (31:59)
• Where you can go to learn more about Tea and connect with Max (38:53)

Links:

Max

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mxcl/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mxcl
• Company: https://tea.xyz/

Nicolas Höning is the Co-Founder and CEO of Seita, an open-source energy optimization and digitalization company. Nicolas took an unconventional path to founding an open-source startup, and throughout this episode he describes how creating a greener world through open-source software is more than a business endeavor for him - it’s a personal mission. Nicolas describes perfectly the challenges that open-source founders face, and is transparent on the decisions he’s still weighing when it comes to choosing an open-source product model and the benefits and challenges of being a boot-strapped startup. I was particularly interested to learn how his company’s project, V2G Liberty, helps individuals who are looking for a greener way to optimize the charging of their electric vehicles, and why Nicolas doesn’t market his other products to individual users.

Highlights:

• I introduce Nicolas Höning, who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Seita, an open-source energy digitalization company (01:00)
• Nicolas describes the unique nature of building open-source software for the energy sector (03:34)
• How Nicolas wound up developing software for the energy sector (05:30)
• The mission at Seita and how it’s also reflected personally in Nicolas’ life mission (06:57)
• Why open-source was an important part of the delivery of Seita’s mission (09:25)
• Nicolas describes the challenge of identifying his users and customers (11:28)
• Why Nicolas doesn’t focus on individual users (14:36)
• Nicolas describes his project V2G Liberty, which helps individuals optimize their EV charging (17:42)
• How Nicolas initially funded Seita and his commercial strategy moving forward (19:51)
• Why Seita launched a commercial product before launching an open-source project (23:30)
• What Nicolas has been considering when deciding between an open core and open source product model (26:35)
• The biggest challenge Nicolas is facing right now at Seita (32:43)
• How listeners can connect with Nicolas and learn more (33:57)

Links:

Nicolas

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nhoening/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nhoening
• Company: https://seita.nl/

Jono Bacon’s passion for building communities has been a driving force in a career taken him from Canonical to GitHub to founding the Community Leadership Core community accelerator. In this episode, Jono shares his definition of community, how a community can create a movement and the differences between the two. We also get a bit of insight into how he developed his passion for building communities and why he continues helping companies build and support theirs through the Community Leadership Core. When Jono speaks about communities he is involved with, he uses “we” instead of “I” to describe their achievements, so I had him dig into that a bit more as we explored the power dynamics that have a huge influence on the success of a community or movement. 

Highlights:

• I introduce Jono, who is the founder of Community Leadership Core (0:28)
• Jono shares more about his passion for building communities and why he started Community Leadership Core (0:51)
• Jono goes into his background, discovering how Linux was created, and finding connection to others through open source (2:47)
• Jono reflects on his time at Canonical and what he learned (10:46)
• How Jono defines and thinks about “community” (13:10)
• The difference between building a community and creating a movement (15:50)
• Using “we” vs “I” in communities to encourage collaboration (18:05)
• Where Jono sees companies missing the mark in community building (20:03)
• Jono explains what delivery looks like in the context of community (22:31)
• Jono shares examples of successful communities (27:05)
• Communities Jono enjoys participating in (28:44)
• How to start a community from scratch (31:22)
• A quick summary of the Community Leadership Core (32:40)

Links:

Jono

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonobacon
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonobacon
• Company: communityleadershipcore.com

Michael Cheng is an M&A Specialist who has had an extensive career that includes a former stint at Facebook as a Product Manager and his current role as a Lawyer. In this episode, Michael returns to the show to have an in-depth discussion around acquisitions. Michael shares his thoughts on why most acquisitions leave everyone involved feeling unsatisfied, and what he thinks should be done by both parties to mitigate the high failure rate of acquisitions. We also chat about the common grievances founders have after going through an acquisition, and the approach Michael recommends to mitigate those regrets. Michael also shares insights on why it’s harder on an open-source company to be successfully acquired if they are in between being a purely services-based or SaaS company. 

Highlights:

• I introduce returning guest Michael Cheng, whose illustrious career spans roles as a Product Manager for Facebook, a Lawyer, and an M&A Specialist (00:22)
• Michael gives some background on his career history and why he’s pursued so many different roles (01:00)
• Michael and I discuss the bird’s eye view of the steps it takes to get acquired (02:23)
• Why most acquisitions fail (06:11) 
• The common grievances that sellers have after going through an acquisition (08:11)
• Michael’s thoughts on the likely outcomes for acquisitions of open-source companies (10:28)
• What open-source founders can do to favor a successful outcome when approaching an acquisition (13:32)
• How Michael thinks success should be measured when evaluating the outcome of an acquisition (17:56)
• Why looking at the open-source community of companies being acquired is so crucial and often overlooked (22:13)
• How the due diligence process is different for an open-source startup versus a SaaS company (25:20)
• Michael describes how each core function in a company is affected by an acquisition (28:12)
• The advice Michael would give to founders to help them make peace with the outcome of an acquisition (33:42)
• How you can connect with Michael to learn more (37:02)

Links:

Michael

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/priorart/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SYOTFS
• Company: https://www.aalyria.com/

Lars Kamp is the Co-Founder and CEO of Some Engineering, the makers of Resoto. In this episode, Lars describes what he’s learned from founding and working at multiple start-ups, as well as the main differentiators he’s experienced founding his first open-source startup. Lars describes his though process when it comes to selecting co-founders, and illustrates why it’s even more important to be discerning when selecting investors. Lars and I also discuss the advantages that open-source gives to founders who are focused on the distribution strategy for their product, and Lars reveals why he is a big proponent of having docs be a part of your product-led growth strategy. Throughout our conversation, Lars’ insights create a detailed picture of what second-time founders think about and how SaaS startup experience relates to open-source business strategy.

Highlights:

• I introduce Lars, who is the CEO and Founder of Some Engineering (00:23)
• Lars describes what he does at Resoto and the user groups they work with (00:47)
• How a tweet by Jeff Barr inspired Lars and his co-founders to start working on Resoto (01:37)
• What it was like for Lars to start a company with co-founders he didn’t know very well (05:03)
• Why Lars went from working with closed-source SaaS companies to founding an open-source company (07:26)
• The main differences Lars has found between founding a SaaS startup and an open-source company (09:24)
• Lars describes the value he sees in investing in really good docs (10:44)
• Why Lars focuses more on distribution than product as a second-time founder (13:19)
• What third time founders think about and what they don’t (16:18)
• Lars’ advice to founders (18:40)
• Why Lars sees a big advantage in open-source business models, especially when it comes to distribution (20:09)
• The advice Lars would give himself if he could go back in time to the early days of Resoto(28:31)
• How to get in touch with Lars (32:23)

Links:

Lars

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/larskamp/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/l1rs
• Company: https://some.engineering/

Amanda “Robby” Robson is a Partner at Cowboy Ventures and the co-host of the Open Source Startup Podcast. In this episode, Robby shares insights on what she’s looking for in open-source founders to potentially invest in, including the importance of being able to manage both your community and your paid model simultaneously. Robby and I also discuss the importance and pitfalls of choosing a monetization strategy, as well as the dangers of having too many monetization models too soon. Throughout our conversation, Robby highlights the specific challenges that open-source founders face, and how she’s seen successful founders either avoid or overcome them.

Highlights:

• I introduce Robby, who is a Partner at Cowboy Ventures and the co-host of the Open Source Startup Podcast (00:22)
• Robby gives some insight into how she evaluates startups from an investment perspective, and the peculiarities that go into evaluating an open-source startup (00:45)
• The nuances of evaluating the market opportunity for an open-source company (05:20)
• A common mistake Robby seeks early stage founders make when evaluating their market size (08:06)
• Robby shares what she’s learned about best practices for seed-stage startups who are looking to determine their monetization strategy (10:02)
• The dangers of having too many monetization models as an early stage startup (13:22)
• Traits that Robby feels are most valuable for an open-source founder to possess (14:48)
• Robby reveals the common traps that open-source founders fall into (17:13)
• Why Robby feels that successfully monetizing an open-source company has more to do with resources than timing (19:46)
• Robby’s thoughts on whether she would ever found an open-source company and how she would approach it (21:18)
• How Robby’s thoughts have changed on whether open source projects need to intentionally become a company or vice versa (23:44)
• What it’s like to advice against the open-source business model as a venture capitalist (29:10)

Links:

Robby

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanda-robson-7227685b/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/amanda_robs
• Company: https://www.cowboy.vc/

Daniel Izquierdo is the Co-Founder and CEO at Bitergia, an open-source company that provides software development data and analytics. In this episode, we connect at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao to discuss how he went from working in academia to co-founding an open-source company. Throughout our conversation, Daniel shares interesting anecdotes on the unique journey he’s taken to build Bitergia, including why they haven’t focused on growing fast so much as they have focused on growing in a way that supports their employees and customers. He also shares insights into how to measure an open-source community, and the knowledge gaps that he sees in people who can’t contextualize the data they’re getting on their community. Daniel also walks us through the other open-source business models Bitergia tried before discovering what worked for them.

Highlights:

• I introduce Daniel, who is the Co-Founder and CEO at Bitergia, as he joins me at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao (00:24)
• Daniel describes the work that he does at Bitergia (00:41)
• The story of why Daniel helped to co-found Bitergia during the finalizing of his PhD (01:38)
• How Daniel and his co-founders got by as they transitioned from academia to founding an open-source company, and what the first year of running Bitergia was like (03:28)
• Daniel explains how Bitergia makes money as an open-source company (06:04)
• The main types of customers that Bitergia works with (07:50)
• The metrics that Daniel feels are critical when measuring an open-source community (08:50)
• Daniel describes the knowledge gap he observes in clients who can’t contextualize the data they get on their community (11:16)
• The story of how Bitergia tried other open-source business models before finding what worked for them (13:41)
• Why Daniel feels it is a disadvantage to have his company based in Spain (16:07)
• Daniel shares his growth philosophy for Bitergia (18:47)
• The challenges facing Daniel and his team at the moment (20:21)
• Daniel’s advice to aspiring open-source founders (21:53)
• The most interesting mistake Daniel feels he made in building Bitergia (23:57)
• Daniel shares what he feels is the main difference between starting a company with and without an open-source component (25:33)

Links:

Daniel

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dicortazar/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/dizquierdo
• Company: https://bitergia.com/

Leszek Manicki is the Engineering Manager at Wikimedia Germany. In this episode, we connect at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao to discuss what he has learned being a part of Wikimedia movement and how that inspired his talk at the summit, How Not To Make Open Source. Throughout our conversation, Leszek describes the challenges Wikimedia has experienced in trying to get more contributors to their projects while also having a high security standard and a complex architecture. He also describes what he has learned from these challenges, and gives recommendations for other organizations to consider as they look to get more contributors to their own projects. Leszek also shares his experience representing a non-profit organization that seeks to offer free knowledge at an event that features more commercialized open-source offerings, and how he hopes this will bring about a positive socio-economic change.

Highlights:

• I introduce Leszek, who is the Engineering Manager at Wikimedia Germany as he joins me at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao (00:23)
• Leszek describes his role at Wikimedia movement and what brings him to the Open Source Summit as a speaker (00:39)
• The number one thing that Leszek believes open-source organizations shouldn’t do (03:41)
• How Wikimedia has attempted to get more external contributors to their projects and what they learned from their successes and failures there (07:17)
• Leszek describes the relationship between the creation of knowledge and the creation of software in the Wikimedia organization (12:57)
• How Leszek and his team are increasing collaboration with external sources to build software (15:43)
• Why Leszek advocates for simple architecture when you’re building a project that will seek external contributors (17:38)
• The inherent value that Leszek sees in having a community of contributors on a project (18:52)
• Leszek reflects on his experience attending the Open Source Summit and his hopes for the future (20:20)

Links:

Leszek

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leszek-manicki
• Company: https://www.wikimedia.org/
  
  

Brian Proffitt is the Senior Manager of Community Outreach at Red Hat’s OSPO. In this episode, we connect at the Open Source Summit EU to discuss how Brian uses events to drive both lead generation and community-building efforts. Throughout our conversation, Brian describes how measuring the ROI of an event can be tricky and why it’s important to look at events as a long game strategy. We also discuss why events provide some of the most valuable feedback when testing your positioning and messaging, and what can be done to increase the odds that your events are successful and produce good outcomes.

Highlights:

• I introduce Brian, who is the Senior Manager of Community Outreach at Red Hat’s OSPO as he joins me at the Open Source Summit EU (00:28)
• How Brian categorizes the different types of events he attends and hosts (01:55)
• The primary metric and objective for lead gen events, and what can be done to increase the odds that your lead gen events bear fruit (05:18)
• Why events are such a valuable part of testing your positioning and messaging (09:14)
• Brian delves into the value of community events and what the ROI for those looks like (12:50)
• The strategy Brian employs for getting the most out of community events when ROI can be difficult to measure (15:40)
• Brian shares why he feels that events are more of a long game strategy (23:24)
• The advice that Brian would give to an open-source founder or start-up that is looking to get the most out of their events strategy (25:28)
• The best ways to learn more and connect with Brian (31:34)

Links:

Brian

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianproffitt/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTechScribe
• Company: https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/channel/red-hat-open-source-program-office

Kim McMahon is the leader of Open Source Marketing & Community at Outshift by Cisco, which is Cisco’s emerging technologies and innovation unit. We recorded this episode at Open Source Summit EU, and talked about Kim’s strategies and tactics related to helping guide users to the correct edition of your product — ie, decide whether the open source option or a commercial option is best for them.

Kim talked about the tricky balance open-source companies must strike between embracing open-source principles and driving revenue as a business, Kim’s tactics for community building and why it’s so important to be clear on why you want to build a community and the outcomes you expect from your investment in community building. 

Highlights:

• I introduce Kim, who is the leader of Open Source Marketing & Community at Outshift by Cisco, as she joins me at the Open Source Summit EU in Bilbao (00:25)
• Kim gives an overview of the talk she is giving at the Open Source Summit, which is on the topic of self-identifying when to shift to a managed version of open-source products (01:35)
• Kim and I discuss the different personas of open-source software users, and the role that product-led growth plays for open-source companies (03:07)
• Why Kim feels it’s critical to not treat your community as a sales database but rather to provide educational content to drive sales of open-source products (09:10)
• Kim and I discuss the challenges of marketing an open-source project and whether positioning truly falls under marketing (10:49)
• How Kim created a feedback loop on her team between sales, marketing, and product to ensure alignment when bringing open-source products to market (13:31)
• Kim walks through her thought process for community building from scratch (17:23)
• How Kim evaluates if a community-building strategy is working or not (24:34)
• What Kim learned about being a part of a community by being a member of a food co-op (28:09)
• Where to connect with Kim and learn more about her work (34:44)

Links:

Kim

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kimmcmahonco/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kamcmahon
• Company: https://eti.cisco.com/
  
  

Alexander Krüger is the Co-Founder and CEO of United Manufacturing Hub, an open-source company that develops software for the manufacturing industry. Throughout our conversation, Alexander describes the unusual path he took in going from a services-based consulting company to a product-led company. He also describes the opportunities and challenges of selling open-source software to an industry that has historically been slow to adopt new technology, as well as his choice to hone a go-to-market strategy before exploring fundraising.

Highlights:

• I introduce Alexander, and he gives some background on his company United Manufacturing Hub (00:22)
• How Alexander decided to develop open-source software for manufacturers (01:39)
• Alexander describes the early days of launching United Manufacturing Hub and how he got his first customers (04:06)
• How long it took to go from a consulting firm to a product-based company (06:57)
• Why it’s important to Alexander that United Manufacturing Hub is an open-source company (08:20)
• Alexander describes the go-to-market strategy at United Manufacturing Hub and how it impacts their fundraising efforts  as well as their monetization model (11:06) 
• Alexander describes an interesting mistake he made and what he learned from it (19:10)
• How different it is to sell open-source software in the manufacturing space versus other industries (21:31) 
• The biggest challenges facing United Manufacturing Hub today (22:35)
• Alexander describes the pros and cons of going from a services company to a product company (25:44)
• Where people can go to learn more about United Manufacturing Hub and connect with Alexander (29:38)

Links:

Alexander

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-krueger/
• Twitter:
• Company: https://www.umh.app/

This week I’m chatting with Steven Renwick, CEO of Tilores. As you’ll hear in the episode, we connected when I mistook Tilores for an open-source company. Steven graciously agreed to come on the show to discuss why they decided against making the product open source — which is actually a conversation worth having, and one that open source founders should probably have more often. 

There are a few options for companies building SaaS tools to solve problems for engineers and enterprises, from open source and open core all the way to completely closed source. In this episode, Steven and I discuss some of these options and why his company decided that going closed source would be the option that provided them the greatest opportunity for growth. Steven himself thought they would start the company as an open-source company, but upon further examination, realized they weren’t leaning in that direction for the right reasons. Listen to hear the journey from the beginning of their search for funding, to heading into the end of their second year in business as a closed-source company.

Highlights:

• I introduce Steven, tell the story of how we met, and he fills us in on the origin of Tilores. (0:32)
• Steven delves deeper into how Tilores started and why they decided against open source. (1:47)
• Steven and I discuss how companies sometimes get into open source before they fully understand all of the licensing options and how it will effect their business. (6:05)
• I point out that transparency is a commonly appreciated value in open source projects and Steven agrees that while it hasn’t been an issue so far, that is something that may push Tilores to open source in the future. (8:58)
• In seeking funding for Tilores, Steven found investors hesitant to buy into an open source company, so he explains why he thinks that is. (10:37)
• Steven and I discuss the many reasons going closed source keeps things simple. (14:27)
• Steven and I debate the idea that being open source implies a grander vision or hope of becoming the standard of service. (16:01)
• I mention that companies have gone from open source to closed source, which leads us to how open source can make it difficult for a company to become profitable. (19:43)
• We then dive into what the difference in vision between making boatloads of money, hoping to become the standard of service, and hoping to serve a particular niche. (21:06)
• If you don’t have a really good reason to go open source, maybe you shouldn’t. (24:15)
• Steven recalls a mistake in the early development of Tilores. (27:12)
• Steven shares his advice for folks making a product for engineers. (29:22)
• Steven reviews Tilores’s biggest challenge now. (30:58)
• Steven shares some final thoughts on open source. (34:07)

Links:

Steven

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenrenwick/
• Twitter: @Major_Grooves
• Company: tilores.io/

Philippe Humeau is the CEO and Co-Founder of CrowdSec, an open-source security company with a very unique business model that doesn’t fit the usual open source patterns. Philippe talked about how to focus on providing a fair exchange of value between maintainers / open source companies and users, and how to monetize a project that is providing value for free.

Philippe also talked about why he thinks open-source founders are under more pressure to get their business model right at the start, tips on making the right hiring decisions, and how to communicate with the community in an effective and transparent way. I also liked Philippe’s cynicism: why he views open source as primarily a pragmatic choice for his business, given the type of company he wanted to build. 

Philippe also shares the logic behind his uncommon view that only making certain features available to paying customers isn’t a truly open-source business strategy.

Highlights:

• I introduce Philippe, who gives some background on his career journey and what he does at CrowdSec (00:22)
• Philippe explains why it seems that security companies are underrepresented in the open-source space (03:19)
• The most common mistake Philippe sees when people start an open-source business (05:03)
• Why Philippe believes that open-source companies are under more pressure to get their business model right the first time (09:26)
• How Philippe came up with Crowdsec’s unique business model (16:15)
• The pushback that Philippe got when he presented his business model initially (19:33)
• Why Philippe views open source as a means to an end, and how that has affected his choices at CrowdSec (25:10)
• The most interesting mistake Philippe has made since starting CrowdSec (27:28)
• Why Philippe believes open source business models are more promising than closed source (31:19)
• The advice that Philippe would give to an open source founder who is looking to build a successful company (34:11)
• Why Philippe feels that having certain features behind a paywall is not a truly open-source business model (35:53)
• Where you can learn more about Philippe and connect with CrowdSec (40:11)

Links:

Philippe

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philippehumeau/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/philippe_humeau
• Company: https://www.crowdsec.net/

Samuel Stroschein is the CEO and Founder of inlang, an open-source company that is looking to not only make localization easy for developers, but also to help companies achieve revenue growth through localization. 

I was particularly excited to talk to Samuel because, back in my way back past, I was a translator, so I’m always interested in solutions that exist to facilitate translation; but also because localizing software is a good example of the intersection between business problems and technical problems. Inlang also strikes me as a company that could see its primary market as developers, or could see its market as CMOs — because of the way localization is both a technical and business problem. And Samuel is clear about this: He says “What we're basically saying is if you want to make more money, you've got to localize.”

Lastly, another thing that stuck out to me about our conversation was that, as we talked about Inlang’s future monetization strategy, Samuel said he thinks that it will likely be around services — which I hadn’t heard from anyone before. His reason: That the software will ultimately become commoditized.  

Listen in to learn why localization is such a challenge for developers, what impact it has on revenue growth, and how Samuel took inlang from an open-source project to an open-source company.

Highlights:

• Samuel introduces himself, describes his background and explains what inlang is solving for (00:37)
• Why localization is such a challenge and how it led Samuel to create inlang (01:21)
• The circumstances that pushed Samuel to turn inlang into an open-source project (04:30)
• Why Samuel decided to take inlang from an open-source project to an open-source company (05:43)
• Samuel explains how localization is a growth opportunity, and how that impacts inlang’s market (09:00)
• The way Samuel and his team are thinking about monetizing inlang (13:22)
• Why being an open-source company is important to Samuel (15:15)
• The collaboration that open-source brings and why it’s so valuable to Samuel (19:00)
• How financial stability, problem-solving, and the nature of building software all contribute to the success of open source in tech (26:06)
• Samuel explains how he views mistakes as stepping stones to positive outcomes (28:41)
• The learnings that Samuel has gathered when hiring for inlang (30:13)
• How you can connect with Samuel and learn more about inlang (31:22)

Links:

Samuel

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samuelstroschein
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/samuelstros
• Company: https://inlang.com/

Kevin Muller is the CEO and co-founder of Passbolt, a security-first, open-source password manager, and he joined me to talk about the risks of having too much time and money, the value of getting trashed on social media and why he values in-person interactions with the team.

There were a lot of interesting pieces to pick apart from this episode. First of all, Kevin talked about the importance of not commercializing too early. I think he's the only founder I've ever heard say something along those lines, but he makes a good argument. (Also, Tim Chen and I talked about the timing of commercialization last week, my takeaway is that no one feels like they commercialized at precisely the right moment). Second, we had a good discussion about how the different priorities of European versus American investors can push companies to make different decisions. The subtext that we didn't address directly is make sure you are aware that your investors priorities are going to influence how your company evolves, choose your investors with that in mind. (and check out the episode with Markus Düttmann if you want more on the EU vs US investment environment for open source startups). Lastly, password managers have been in the news, and not in a good way — and how to best react to a super embarrassing situation for a competitor is not always obvious. So we talked about how Passbolt has tried to steer the conversation about password management in light of recent high-profile hacks in the ecosystem. 

Highlights:

• Kevin introduces himself and describes his work at Passbolt (00:26)
• How Kevin got the idea for Passbolt and the story of how he brought his idea to life (01:07)
• The mistakes that Kevin and his co-founders made when launching Passbolt (05:03)
• What happened when Kevin and his co-founders officially launched Passbolt in 2016 (08:12)
• How Kevin and his co-founders decided to move from a purely open-source product to a commercialized product (09:32)
• Why Passbolt is a hybrid company and the value Kevin sees in having employees spend time in the office (12:41)
• Kevin describes why it was so important for Passbolt to be an open-source company (15:58)
• Why Kevin feels it’s important not to commercialize an open-source product too quickly (19:07)
• The different priorities of European VCs versus U.S. VCs (21:58)
• Why honest feedback is so valuable and how Kevin and his team evaluated the feedback they got at the launch of Passbolt (24:26)
• Kevin’s reaction to data breaches that happen to other password management solutions (27:09)
• The biggest challenges that Kevin and the team at Passbolt are working on currently (31:09)
• Kevin’s advice to open-source founders (32:47)

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmuller80/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/passbolt/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/passbolt
• Company: https://www.passbolt.com

Tim Chen is a Partner at Essence VC and also the Co-Host of the Open Source Startup Podcast. Through these channels, he has the opportunity to speak with a broad variety of open source startups. Throughout our conversation, we explore the patterns that Tim sees in the open source startup space. Tim talked about how too many founders take the decision to build an open source company too lightly and the path that he would take if he were to start a venture-backed open source startup tomorrow. We also discuss the different monetization models of open-source startups and the true business value of an open source project. 

Highlights:

• Tim introduces himself and describes his role at Essence VC as well as his work as Co-Host of the Open Source Startup Podcast (00:22)
• The common patterns that Tim sees having worked with so many open source startups (02:25)
• Tim describes the landscape of open source and how it varies from open source projects to venture-backed, open source companies (06:48)
• What path Tim would take if he were to start a venture-backed, open source startup tomorrow (09:31)
• How Tim views different monetization models and their potential profitability (17:29)
• Tim’s views on the pros and cons of an open-core model (20:34)
• The business value of an open source project according to Tim (24:47)
• How Tim’s evaluation and investing tactics have changed as he’s worked with more open source startups (31:58)
• Where listeners can find more information about Tim and learn more about his work (37:47)

Links:

Tim

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/timchen
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/tnachen
• Company: https://www.essencevc.fund/

Franz Karlsberger is the CEO of Amazee.io, an open-source platform that seeks to make developers’ lives easier by abstracting their day-to-day workload. Throughout our conversation, we explore what it means to join an open-source start-up as an external CEO, and why Franz put so much emphasis on go-to-market strategy. Franz also walks through the importance of knowing what open-source business model your company will follow, and how to measure the success of an open-source project.

Listen in as Franz shares some of his most interesting mistakes, what he’d do differently if he could start over, and why Franz feels open-source is more than just a type of software, it’s a company ethos that affects everything down to the team culture. 

Highlights:

• Franz introduces himself and his company Amazee.io, which is a ZeroOps application delivery platform (00:50)
• How Amazee.io went from being a point solution to a platform solution (06:20)
• Why Franz was brought in as an external CEO for Amazee.io to accelerate growth (10:03)
• How Franz adjusted to working at an open-source start-up and what that learning curve was like for him (11:47)
• The importance of open-source at Amazee.io and why it is baked into their core values and ethos as a company (15:30)
• How the go-to-market model differs for Amazee.io’s cloud offering versus their managed offering (17:51)
• Franz describes some of the most interesting mistakes he’s made and what he’s learned from them (23:25)
• Franz’s views on measuring the success of an open-source project (26:29)
• How listeners can connect with Franz and learn more about Amazee.io (32:37)

Links:

Franz

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/franzkarlsberger/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/fkarlsberger
• Company: https://www.amazee.io/

It’s kind of a cliche, Vlad A. Ionescu, founder and CEO of Earthly, says, but his first attempts to build something really awesome focused on amazing technology. With hindsight, he doesn’t think it’s so surprising that those efforts weren’t successful. It’s not that passion doesn’t matter, but rather that he had to learn to build things that inspired passion from both the market and the builders. We also talked about:

• Leaving a job, blowing through his savings, going back to a job before finding entrepreneurial success
• Realizing that if he wanted to have the kind of impact on the world that he wanted to, he had to figure out a way to make it as an entrepreneur, because the alternative was climbing the corporate ladder and that didn’t sound like fun
• Why it’s important to be brutally honest with yourself and what you suck at
• How Vlad finally found success at Shift Left (now Quiet.ai)

I also really liked his ideas about cutting corners — that startups will always have to cut some corners, it’s just up to you to decide which ones to cut. 

Highlights:

• Vlad recounts lessons learned from early entrepreneurial failures. (2:31)
• Taking failure personally to overcome weaknesses (5:19)
• Vlad explains what led to his first success with Shift Left (7:40)
• Vlad shares his journey from Shift Left to Earthly (13:40)
• Why open source? (17:03)
• How Vlad and his team built Earthly based on what he learned from building Shift Left (25:07)
• Breaking a product down to its components to find more value (31:38)
• The Startup Hierarchy of Needs (34:02)

Links:

Vlad

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Earthly
• Qwiet.ai
• Personal Site

Markus Düttmann, a former Principal at Nauta Capital, is steeped in the European open source scene. From his beginnings in theoretical physics, Düttmann’s hard pivot into venture capital funding granted him a spot in the developing tech world as a connoisseur of the culture and a champion for start-ups. He even contributed to Nauta Capital’s European Open Source Report detailing the state of the ecosystem as of October 2022.

On this episode of the Business of Open Source, listen to his insight into the European markets, the various business models generally used for open source start-ups, and what he looks for in an open source start-up.

Note: Markus has since left Nauta and is on paternity leave. He also asked me to add a follow-up to the episode: After thinking more about the biggest danger to open source companies, he thinks most of them will fail from problems like not building the right team, failure to find product market fit and/or failure to monetize. Hyperscalers are a danger, but probably won’t be what causes most startups to fail. 

Highlights:

• The unique qualities of the European open source ecosystem (2:20)
• European market vs. the American Market in terms of funding (3:45)
• Advantages and disadvantages of a European open source company (4:40)
• Navigating the use of different business models within a business (8:14)
• How Markus evaluates open source start-ups (11:46)
• Don't be the open source version of an existing enterprise company (16:14)
• Signs of a company worth investing in (16:45)
• Potential risks to the open source ecosystem in the coming years (19:24)

Links:

Markus

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Nauta Capital
• European Open Source Report

This week Shanea Leven, CEO and Co-Founder of CodeSee, joins me to chat about demystifying code bases and building an effective team.

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Shanea and I discuss the origins of her company, CodeSee, how it morphed from a training course to a SaaS product, and how they contribute to open source even though CodeSee is not an open source company. Shanea also shares valuable insight into working closely with your spouse, the importance of communication and empathy in building an effective team, and how she’s evolved as a leader. Listen to hear all of her insight and advice, and find out how the CodeSee SaaS offering helps companies understand their code bases and make critical decisions faster.

Highlights:

• How Shanea’s experience at Docker influenced her decision about whether or not to make CodeSee open source (1:51)
• Origin and history of CodeSee (6:58)
• How CodeSee progressed from a training course to a SaaS product (10:41)
• Shanea’s advice for other entrepreneurs interested in founding a startup with their spouse (14:36)
• Lessons Shanea has learned from the challenges of building a team (17:18)
• The importance of face time with customers (23:08)
• How CodeSee works (26:31)
• How CodeSee contributes to open source without being open source (30:14)

Links:

Shanea

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• CodeSee

This week Heikki Nousiainen, CTO and Co-founder of Aiven, joins me to chat about building the business, his passion for open source and entrepreneurship, and his hopes for the future of open source in the public sector. 

In this episode, Heikki and I explore the successes and challenges he and his three co-founders encountered in creating and maintaining their global open source data platform. We discuss how they choose technologies to support, the importance of customer demand, how founders can learn to work together, and when to “kill your darlings.” 

Highlights:

• Origins of Aiven (1:40)
• Pros and cons of being headquartered in Helsinki (4:41)
• Aiven’s relationship to the open source community (6:02)
• How Aiven has evolved since its inception (7:34)
• How Aiven chooses technologies to incorporate into their service offerings (9:21)
• One thing that has been very successful for Aiven (12:51)
• Why Aiven chose their business model (16:33)
• The biggest challenge Aiven is currently facing (17:37)
• The State of Open Con and giving back to the Community (20:17)
• Barriers to more open source adoption in the public sector (21:24)

Links:

Heikki

• LinkedIn
• Twitter: @hnousiainen
• Aiven

Michael Cheng, Chief Legal Officer at Aalyria Technologies, is a master at strategy and execution for open-source products and companies. From his humble beginning spearheading the open source team at Meta (formerly Facebook), Cheng has honed his knowledge about the interworking of open source and utilizes it to its fullest potential.

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Cheng talks about his time as Meta's lead in open source as well as what it's like to be an individual working for a large company. He also explains what happens in mergers and acquisitions with open source projects and the legality of being a small fish in a large pond!

Highlights:

• A little insight into Meta's open source (2:06)
• Detractors on a project (4:25)
• It's hard running a large company open source (7:47)
• Is it a problem to be individually driven? (9:45)
• Creating projects while working for large companies in open source (13:25)
•  Do they have a right to reprimand? (16:16)
• What happens in a merger for an open source company (17:53]
• Recommendations to an inquirer (21:47)
• Personality-deprived communities (24:48)

Links:

Michael

• LinkedIn
• Aalyria

Are you struggling to find a co-founder? Having trouble navigating a relationship with your partners? These are all questions Tanis Jorge, CEO of The Co-founder's Hub, tackles daily in her work. A serial tech entrepreneur and a leading entrepreneur advisor, it is no wonder Jorge has founded and built many businesses, such as Trulioo and IQuiri Inc.

On this episode of The Business Of Open Source, I ask Jorge about finding the right co-founder, why legal frameworks are so important, and the hi's and lows of collaboration. We also discuss warning signs, life stages, and why everyone is a janitor!

Highlights:

• The right co-founder (2:25)
• Life stages are important (4:31)
• The uncomfortable task (5:50)
• The legal framework (8:00)
• Everybody's the janitor (10:05)
• The hi's and lows of collaboration (14:46)
• Navigating problems and relationships(18:45)
• No one is talking about this (23:24)
• Meeting a bad partner (24:35)
• Multiple founder relationships (26:10)

Links:

Tanis

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• The Cofounder's Hub
• Trulioo

From college dropout to developer efficiency guru, Kyle Campbell knows his way around workflow integrations for software companies. He is a fierce proponent of efficient workflows and hopes to spread his experience to any company that can benefit from it. 

In this episode of the Business of Open Source, Campbell discusses the origins of his Company CTO.ai, its revenue model, and why he created this AI companion for developers. He also talks about being a consultant, running a start up, and when it is time to shift gears to building a revenue-focused company.

Highlights:

• Workflows.sh (4:10)
• The creations of CTO.ai (5:06)
• Can being a consultant be a boon for a company (8:48)
• Revenue models of CTO.ai (11:32)
• The tipping point of in building a business (15:35)
• Examples of escape patches (18:20)
• What is the right amount of money to raise? (20:45)
• The pricing model of CTO.ai (24:06)
• Is not having an open-source project limiting? (27:24)

Links:

Kyle

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• CTO.ai

Matt Butcher is no stranger to the ways of ethical philosophy. With a Ph.D. in Religion and Computer Science, he enjoys philosophical conversations of ethical dilemmas. Butcher passionately debates wild theories and paradoxical situations against those not afraid to question reality in pursuit of knowledge.

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Hear how Butcher discusses ethics in the open source world, the grey areas in being an ethical company, and the moral nature of work/life balance. Butcher also details how some of the greatest philosophical minds shaped his own view of ethics and the pursuit of "that middle road."

Highlights:

• Ethics and Computer Science vs. AI (1:30)
• Ph.D. in religion and… computer science? (3:05)
• Ethical claims in open source (4:52)
• Is it ethical to build a company like yours? (8:50)
• Interacting with people to see the value (13:45)
• Understanding balancing creativity with reality(17:52)
• What does it mean to build an ethical company(19:42)
• "Complex is such an interesting choice here" (24:43)
• Finding that middle road (28:29)
• Common unethical source practices (29:30)
• Have you changed your ethic since becoming a CEO? (31:50)

Links:

Matt

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Fermyon

Dawn Foster, Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware, is a champion of community strategy and development. A doctor of Philosophy, Foster is well-versed in the understanding of collaboration and leverages her mountain of knowledge to fight for the health of maintainers in open-source projects.

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Dawn Foster joins me from the Open Source Summit North America to tackle community strategy and contribution growth methods. Foster also touches on the differences between open contributions and what project leads should do to help grow their maintainers.

Highlights:

• Why is it essential to have a contributor growth strategy? (1:46)
• Loss of control (3:10)
• How to be proactive for project growth (4:24)
• Proactive communication to foster a relationship (7:15)
• Non-code contributions are just as crucial as maintainers (9:47)
• Is it a mistake to have no contributor growth strategy (12:20)
• One tactic when being a single maintainer (13:33)
• Replacing your maintainers (16:02)
• Don't get arrested (18:10)
• Improving your skills in maintaining  (19:17)
• Navigating contributions to a project (21:29)
• Increasing the number of contributions per person (24:13)
• Example of a good growth strategy (27:07)

Links:

Dawn 

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• VMware

Bart Farrell is a content creator and community leader in the public speaking world. Based in Spain, he has developed a massively popular platform through podcasting and consulting as a nontechnical person in a technical space.

In this episode, Farrell breaks down the ins and outs of public speaking. He also discusses the art form of speaking offline rather than online, what to expect when talking to an audience, and what it takes to deliver the gift of gab. Farrell also goes into his struggles in becoming a public speaker and his favorite influence on his craft—all this and more in this episode of The Business of Open Source.

Highlights:

• The Fear of public speaking (2:00)
• Not a life or death situation (5:10)
• Be comfortable while speaking(8:40)
• You only get one start (9:57)
• A I D A (11:22)
• Online is not offline (15:03)
• How to get into public speaking (17:00)
• Basic building blocks (19:00)
• How to improve in public speaking (23:35)
• A favorite public speaker (26:55)

Links:

Bart

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• bartfarrell.com

Ivar Østhus, The CTO and creator of Unleashed, is a revolutionary in shipping feature management tools and rollouts for companies worldwide. Through hardships, Østhus came into his own in the open source world by relieving the pressure on developers bringing new creations to light in their projects.

On this episode of The Business of Open Source, Hear how Østhus discusses the inception of Unleashed and the struggles he overcame in the early stages. He also talks about being a European company in the tech industry and why he prefers to be called a "Creator" rather than a Founder.

Highlights:

• Creator but not a Founder(1:48)
• Why Unleash? (2:33)
• Why open source (6:20)
• Taking the plunge with unleash (9:38)
• Being a European company(15:25)
• Early mistakes in Unleash (17:40)
• Long-term support open source user(19:40)
• The biggest challenge (25:20)

Links:

Ivar

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Unleash

Josh Koenig, Chief Strategy Officer and Co-Founder of Pantheon, is a WebOps aficionado focused on creating first-class platforms and delivering results. Recognized as a Top 25 Software Products Executive by The Software Report, it is no wonder he is passionate about his ability to discuss and understand the developer experience while fostering relationships with users.

On this episode of the Business of Open Source, Koenig discusses the art of fostering opposing community relations and his ideals of the developer experience. He also talks about the niche that is WebOps and his journey of creating Pantheon.

Highlights:

• What is Pantheon? (0:55)
• Pantheon's role in communities (3:50)
• Teamwork makes the dream work (7:20)
• Challenges with a no-control work model (9:00)
• Balancing control and elevation in open source (11:10)
• Squarespace, but not really (13:10)
• Mistakes in building Pantheon(15:06)
• Connecting with a community (16:55)
• The difference between WordPress and Drupal (19:30)
• Community involvement (21:35)
• Pleasant surprises (23:40)
• Top challenge (25:40)
• Last remarks (28:50)

Links:

Josh

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Company
• Drupal
• WordPress

Daniel Loreto, the founder of Jetpack.io, is a massive believer in transforming how engineers scale their backend for cloud-based platforms. Deeply rooted in the tech industry, Loretto takes great pride in building tools to large usage scales and utilizing them to attend to the needs of his users and community.

On this episode of the Business of Open Source, Hear about the inner workings of jetpack.io and its challenges in its history. Also, listen to Loreto's tips for success for a startup, his navigation of open source and proprietary coding, and why Loreto is not an open source purist.

Highlights:

• The history of jetpack.io (3:31)
• Pursuing the open source model (4:53)
• Got to move fast as a startup (6:38)
• Re-integrating feedback into your work (7:43)
• Why an open source project (8:48)
• Open source code vs. proprietary code (10:55)
• Unexpected challenges ( 12:15)
• Not an open-source purist (14:54)
• Challenges in selling open source products (16:47)
• Developing guidelines for jetpack.io (17:42)
• Success does not mean success (20:01)
• Lessons from building a company (23:13)

"Fueling a culture of openness in innovation and research." That slogan is well known to Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, a leader in GitHub's open-source maintainer program. With a background in open science, Mayes felt right at home when jumping to open source and mentoring many developers at the Cloud-based Hosting service.

On this episode of The Business of Open Source, listen to Mayes speak on sustainability and resilience in building a platform for developers and what makes a robust and sustainable environment. Mayes also talks about financial stability and models in the open source world and what it truly means to break from a main backer and build on your own.

Highlights:

• Supporting "maintainers" (3:02)
• Succession planning (3:38)
• Being resilient in sustainability (5:40)
• Building financially without company backing (6:29)
• GitHub experimentation (10:42)
• Strategies for critical projects that are lower in the stack (11:55)
• Technical sustainability (13:47)
• Hypothetical financial models (19:33)

Links:

Abigail

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• GitHub

Akriti Dokania, a heavyweight in the venture capital business, is a partner at Ridge Ventures. With a background in computer sciences and building a B2B company from the ground up, it is no wonder Dokania is an expert in the complexities of developing software and understanding the lifecycle of a start-up.

On this week's episodes of the Business of Open Source, Dokania shows her wealth of knowledge in investing in open source start-ups. She also explains what founders should look for in an investor and the struggles of monetization for an open source start-up. Lastly, Dokania gives the secrets to working towards a revenue model and scaling a start-up to a fully fleshed-out company.

Highlights:

• Open source vs. non-open source companies(from an investor's eye) (2:07)
• The go to market for open source (4:03)
• Disadvantages of an open source start-up (5:29)
• Too deep into open source to monetize (7:53)
• Red flags a founder should look out for in an investor (14:24)
• Common mistakes for open source companies looking to monetize (16:24)
• Unique business strategies in open source (19:24)

Links:

Akriti 

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Company

Stefan Avram, Co-Founder and Head of Growth at WunderGraph, is taking the open source world by storm. With his company specializing in full stack and workflows through API composition, it is no wonder he has fostered a vast community of developers around WunderGraph.

On today's episode, Avram delves into the story and creation of WunderGraph. He also recounts how he organized a massive discord community to foster healthy feedback for growth. Lastly, Avram speaks on the hardships of building a start-up company and what it takes to flourish—all this and more on this episode of The Business of Open Source.

Highlights:

• Taking a leap of faith (3:40)
• Engineer to Handler of Marketing (5:04)
• Navigating becoming a Co-Founder (7:03)
• The primary benefit of open source in WunderGraph (11:44)
• Building a community space for feedback (14:23)
• Top 3 mistakes in start-ups (18:25)
• Advice to your past self (22:38)

Links:

Stefan

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• WunderGraph

Emre Baran is a man on a mission to simplify authorization protocols for software developers. With his company Cerbos, Baran has put in years of dedication to easy authorization and helping build the authorization databases of over one hundred EU companies.

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Emre Baran goes through the history of his company Cerbos. He also talks about telemetry challenges, monetization strategies, and the challenges that made him who he is today. Find out more in this episode!

Highlights:

• The right time to take the plunge (4:48)
• Monetization strategy (6:21)
• The most interesting mistake (9:31)
• Overcoming telemetry challenges (12:10)
• The importance of open source for Cerbos (15:48)
• Selling shoes to shoemakers (17:47)
• Helping people through Cerbos (25:11)

Links:

Emre

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emrebaran/
• Twitter: @emre
• Company: Cerbos.dev

Tyler Jewell is an enterprise technology investor and managing director of Dell Technologies Capital, with a hand in many open source companies. A returning guest to the podcast, Jewell shares with us his foresight and knowledge about the past and current history of the open source landscape.

Hear about the inner workings of Lightbend and how far Akka open source projects have evolved over the years. Also, listen to Jewell discuss business strategy for open source companies and the common mistakes of running open source. Jewell also shares a little about the resiliency of open source businesses in the economic market.

Highlights:

• Akka projects over the years (4:00)
• When companies should have open source licenses vs. when they should not (11:35)
• Eclipse Che open source (13:20)
• Is it better to be open source as a company? (14:30)
• Open source as a development strategy rather than a business strategy (19:10)
• Common mistakes in open source companies (21:25)
• Are open source companies resilient economically? (23:14)

Links:

Tyler

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Dell Technologies Capital
• Lightbend
• Eclipse Che
• WSO2

From software engineer to leading developer products at Facebook, Ron Efroni was familiar with the challenges facing developers. His co-founder recognized the power of Nix to remove the boundaries of development, and together they started Flox to reduce the barriers to the adoption of Nix.

In our final episode from the State of Open Con in London, Ron Efroni, CEO and Co-founder of Flox, joins me to discuss the future of Flox and Nix, the amazing community that keeps Nix moving forward, and advice for his former self as well as anyone interested in building an open source company. 

Highlights:

• Ron introduces himself, Flox, and Nix (0:50)
• Ron recounts the origins of Flox (3:32)
• Ron reviews the value add Flox provides (7:04)
• Leaving the control of the Nix roadmap to the community (10:30)
• Ron shares advice for himself 1.5 years ago (13:33) and...
• Advice for other open source founders (14:40)
• Why Nix is happy to have feedback and excitement from the community (17:56)

Links:

Ron

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ronefroni/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/ronefroni
• Company: https://floxdev.com/
• Nix: https://nixos.org/

Sometimes it seems like our devices can read our minds. While that can occasionally be helpful, it can raise concerns about how much of our personal data is collected. Gael Duval, CEO of Murena, noticed this issue in 2017 and has been working on solutions ever since. 

In this episode, Gael joins me at the State of Open Con in London to discuss the origins of Murena and how you can protect your data. He also shares lessons he’s learned as an entrepreneur and advice for aspiring founders in the open source space. Listen to hear his unique perspective as an open source B2C founder. 

Highlights:

• Gael introduces himself and outlines why he started Murena (0:51)
• Murena’s relationships with hardware (3:43)
• Gael reflects on Murena being a rare B2C co, as opposed to most open source B2B companies (6:04)
• The value of being open source for Murena was building on existing technologies (9:16)
• Gael shares advice for his younger self (11:58)
• Gael recalls his most significant challenges at Murena (14:36)
• How views on privacy differ between Europe and the US (15:43)
• Gael shares advice for starting a B2C open source company (17:06)

Links:

Gael

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Murena
• E Foundation

Peter Zaitzev, the founder of Percona, is an expert on open source strategy and database optimization. With his level of experience in the world of open source, Peter enjoys challenging himself and going against the grain in order to come out on top.

On this episode of The Business of Open Source, Peter breaks down his thought process on how he approaches open source for businesses as a consultant and dives into the inner workings of Percona from how they generate revenue to customer retention. We also discuss how anyone new to the space can get into open source and make a career out of it.

Highlights:

• The differentiator between Percona and Oracle (3:11)
• Challenging yourself (6:02)
• How Percona generates revenue (9:43)
• Tough moments for Percona (13:07)
• Getting into open source as a businessman (15:09)
• Looking ahead for Percona (18:23)
• Advice for Peter’s past self (19:42)

Links:

Peter

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterzaitsev/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/PeterZaitsev
• Company: percona.com
• Renegade Underdogs

Frank Karlitschek has worked in the open source software space since the late 90s when he contributed to KDE. Since then, he’s managed multiple teams and start ups and used his influence to make the internet a better, more secure place. 

In this episode, Frank joins me at The State of Open Con to share his passion for open source and improving the internet. We discuss his early involvement in open source and how he started his own company. He also shares advice for new founders and encouragement for anyone hoping to make a positive impact on the world.

Highlights:

• Frank introduces himself and Nextcloud and shares his initial excitement around open source (0:50)
• Frank shares some details about his open source business model and how the company came together (2:51)
• Frank recalls mistakes he made early on in his career and what he's learned (6:43)
• Current projects/ processes in the “trial and error” phase of development (8:10)
• The value of being open source (10:41)
• Frank shares the advice he’d give his younger self and someone starting an open source company now (13:03)

Links:

Frank

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankkarlitschek/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/fkarlitschek
• Mastadon: https://mastodon.social/@Karlitschek
• Website: karlitschek.de
• Company: https://nextcloud.com/

Matt Barker, President and co-founder of Jetstack, has been involved in open source and Kubernetes since the early days of its development. With a long list of open source projects behind him, he decided to hone in on Jestack and with its success, share the knowledge he’s gained over the years as an OpenUK Entrepreneur in Residence.

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, Matt joins me from the State of Open Con and shares his initial vision for Jestack and reviews the projects that helped him get the company to where it is today. As Jestack is a fully bootstrapped company, Matt shares his perspective on how that impacts a founder’s decisions. We also discuss the importance of sharing your knowledge with the next generation of founders through mentorship as Matt does with OpenUK. 

Highlights:

• Matt introduces himself and Jestack (0:48)
• Matt’s open source projects (3:39)
• Choosing one project to focus on (8:24)
• Matt explains why it seems easier for bootstrapped companies to niche down (10:42)
• Matt reflects on his early mistakes as an entrepreneur and what he’s learned from them (16:40)
• Matt explains his role as OpenUK Entrepreneur in Residence (19:30)

Links:

Matt

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbarks/
• Company: https://www.jetstack.io/
• OpenUK: https://openuk.uk/

In the first of my series of interviews from the State of Open Con in London, I’m chatting with Rob Taylor, CEO of ChipFlow, about the intersection between open source software design and hardware design, bringing community into the hardware space, and how geopolitics could shape the future of open source. 

In this episode, Rob shares his fascinating hardware and software design background, including his first job working on lighting desks for theaters. Then we delve into his other companies before discovering the impetus for starting ChipFlow, how and why they do what they do, and some plans for the future. We also chat briefly about monetization, touch on the impact geopolitics could have on tech, and share our favorite parts of conferences like the State of Open Con. 

Highlights:

• Rob introduces himself and shares a bit of his background in software and open source (0:43)
• Rob recounts the origins of ChipFlow (4:08)
• Rob explains how hardware and software design are similar and where they diverge (7:30)
• How ChipFlow helps companies create custom chip designs for their products (9:38)
• How changes in open source software correlate to the hardware space (12:11)
• How Rob and his team encourage community in the hardware space (15:02)
• Rob’s final thoughts on the future of open source look to geopolitics (17:53)

Links:

Rob

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robtaylor78/
• Twitter: @robtaylor78
• Company: https://www.chipflow.io/

Josh Thurman, Co-founder and Head of DevRel at Uffizzi, joins me to chat about his journey from Navy Seal to tech startup Co-founder.

In this episode, Josh and I discuss his background as a Navy Seal, how he dove into tech and started Uffizzi, and the mistakes and failures he overcame along the way. We also dig into open source as a development model, creating vs. capturing value, and the importance of compatibility with software users are already implementing. Listen to find out what Josh considers his biggest failure, how he and Uffizzi overcame it, and how companies are using the product now. 

Highlights:

• Josh introduces himself and Uffizzi (0:45)
• Josh recounts early failures at Uffizzi (3:55)
• How Josh and Uffizzi settled on open source (6:28)
• Open source as a development model (9:33)
• Creating vs. Capturing value (10:50)
• Josh discusses the importance of modularity and compatibility with other software (13:36)
• Why Uffizzi decided to focus on Kubernetes (15:54) 
• Why Josh as a founder, chose the role of Head of DevRel (17:25)
• How Josh and Uffizzi pivoted to recover from the failures he discussed earlier (20:33)
• Uffizzi case studies (27:01)

Links:

Josh

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-p-thurman/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/JoshThurman19
• Company: https://uffizzi.com
• Uffizzi Slack community: https://uffizzi.slack.com/join/shared_invite/zt-ffr4o3x0-J~0yVT6qgFV~wmGm19Ux9A#/shared-invite/email

Nikhil Nandagopal, Founder and CPO of Appsmith, joins me to chat about building trust, the importance of starting as an open source offering, and how the community continues to shape the future of Appsmith.

In this episode, Nikhil and I discuss the origins of Appsmith, building a business edition as well as a community one, and the challenges he and his team encountered along the way. We compare the community and business editions, discuss the importance of community and an educational, product-led approach to marketing, and even touch on the stigma of the “low code” label with which Appsmith has chosen to align. Listen to learn Nikhil’s views and insight on open source, community, education, developer relations, and more. 

Highlights:

• Nikhil introduces himself and Appsmith (0:49)
• Why open source? (2:37)
• Lessons learned by starting with an open source approach (4:57)
• Appsmith community edition vs. business edition (6:33)
• Nikhil recounts his most significant mistakes in creating Appsmith (9:59)
• Nikhil shares Appsmith’s marketing strategy (12:20)
• The importance of nurturing your community in open source (16:01)
• Unexpected challenges Nikhil encountered in the early days of Appsmith (18:03)

Links:

Nikhil

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhil-nandagopal-05534241/
• Twitter: @NikilNandagopal
• Company: https://www.appsmith.com/

Adi Gelvan, Co-founder and CEO of Speedb, joins me to share his experience in moving Speedb from a closed source proprietary company to open source with an enterprise offering. 

In this episode, Adi and I explore moving from a proprietary to an open source strategy. From pros and cons, pushback from team members, and mistakes along the way, listen to hear how Adi and his team handled those challenges and more.

Highlights:

• Adi introduces himself and Speedb (0:47)
• Why speedb decided to switch to open source and the changes they made to do it (2:28)
• Adi reviews the pros and cons of open source for Speedb (8:34)
• How Adi and his team handled the pushback on the decision to move to open source (12:43)
• Adi’s top two mistakes in making the transition to open source (15:04)
• Surprises Adi encountered in switching to an open source strategy (16:38)
• Adi shares his advice for someone thinking about switching from closed source to open source (19:22)

Links:

Adi

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adi-gelvan/
• Company: speedb.io 
  • Open Source site: speedb.dev
  • Discord: https://discord.com/invite/5fVUUtM2cG

Heather Meeker, General Partner at OSS Capital, joins me to discuss the legal elements of open source, including options for licensing and business structure.

In this episode, Heather and I explore the intersection of law and open source by reviewing licensing options, challenges, and common mistakes startups make early on. We also get into less common licensing and business models and what might be in store for the future of licensing in open source.

Highlights:

• Heather introduces herself and reviews her background in open source (0:50)
• Legal issues startups can run into early on (2:02)
• Common licensing paradigms in open source (6:00)
• Less common licensing options (10:40)
• The model Heather would use if she were starting a new business (15:21)
• How the challenges commercial open source startups face are different from those proprietary software companies face (16:58)
• Heather shares her idea of the number one mistake new startups make (26:37)
• Heather shares her thoughts on the future of open source startups (27:28)

Links:

Heather

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heathermeeker/
• Twitter: @HeatherMeeker4
• Company: https://oss.capital/
• Website: HeatherMeeker.com

Sam Richard, Head of Growth at ngrok, joins me to talk about product-led growth in open source and ngrok’s history in open source.

In this episode, Sam and I discuss product-led growth - how it differs from a traditional sales model, what metrics founders can use to track their development, and how to find your activation metrics. We also review what kind of companies would benefit from a product-led approach, who might not, and how companies can avoid mistakes others have made in implementing the strategy. 

Highlights:

• Sam introduces herself and shares her definition of product-led growth (0:45)
• Traditional metrics vs. product-led metrics (8:53)
• How product-led growth evolves once a company moves past the early stages (13:12)
• What kind of companies or founders product led growth is appropriate for (14:54)
• Sam and Emily explore questions about products that buyers love, but users hate (19:53)
• Moving from product-led growth to a sales-led model (21:15)
• Sam reviews ngrok’s moves from open source to closed source and back (23:57)

Links:

Sam

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-crowell-richard/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/SamCRichard
• Company: https://ngrok.com/
• productbenchmarks.com

Georg Link, Director of Sales at Bitergia, joins me to chat about how open source startups can use metrics to keep their communities healthy, why he approaches his role as an educator first, and how a company’s culture impacts the way they sell for open source. 

In this episode, Georg and I discuss how he started the CHAOSS (Community Health Analysis Open Source Software) project to evaluate the health of open source communities and how to use metrics to gain that understanding. We also get some insight into Georg’s passion for open source, his views on sales, and Bitergia’s company culture.

Highlights:

• Georg introduces himself and Bitergia (0:48)
• What metrics are helpful for an open source startup to track? (4:33)
• How Georg approaches his role as Director of Sales primarily as an educator (11:48)
• How Biturgia’s company culture impacts the way they sell for open source (17:41)
• Ideal use cases for open source metrics (24:15)

Links:

Georg

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/georglink/
• Twitter: @georglink
• Email: [email protected]
• Company: https://bitergia.com/

Jonathan Reimer, CEO & Co-Founder at Crowd.dev, joins me to chat about community-led growth and cultivating a community around an open source startup.

In this episode, Jonathan and I discuss the differences between community-led growth and product-led growth, review the meaning of community, and explore the challenges of building a community around an open source startup. We also get into how community-led growth can benefit a company, the biggest mistakes startups make around community building, and the origins and operations of Jonathan’s company, Crowd.dev.

Highlights:

• Jonathan introduces himself, and his definition of community-led growth (0:45)
• The motivation behind community-led growth strategies (3:04)
• Gauging the health of a community (8:14)
• The origins of Crowd.dev and how it works to make community building easier (12:47)
• Common pain points in community building and how to keep cultivating a healthy one (16:17)
• Jonathan’s path to starting his own company (18:08)

Links:

Jonathan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathimer/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonathimer
• Company: https://www.crowd.dev/

Brian MacDonald, Manager of Technical Editing at DigitalOcean joins me to discuss the importance of writing efficient documentation for any product.

In this episode, Brian and I chat about his talk at All Things Open entitled Verbs Not Nouns and covering the importance of writing documentation that instructs your users on how to use your product to solve the problem it intends to solve for them. We also cover common mistakes in writing documentation and tips for ensuring yours is effective. Listen to hear Brian's advice and resources to improve your documentation. 

Highlights:

• Brian introduces himself and his role at DigitalOcean (0:47)
• Why does documentation matter? (3:29)
• The most common mistake people make with documentation (7:07)
• Why are docs frequently neglected? (11:37)
• Who should write the docs? (15:47)
• How to ensure your docs are efficient (20:21)
• When should you start writing your documentation? (24:32)

Links:

Brian

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/macdonaldeditorial/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bmac_editor
• Company: https://www.digitalocean.com/
• Resources: 
  • Verbs Not Nouns Slides: https://archive.org/details/verbs-not-nouns-ato-2022
  • Write The Docs Community: https://www.writethedocs.org/

Joseph Jacks joins me to share his enthusiasm for Open Source and what he calls Commercial Open Source Companies, how the idea of Open Source is changing with new technologies, and what that means for the definition of Open Source.

In this episode, Joseph gets specific about the definition of Open Source and new technologies building on the original concept while sharing his excitement about the developments in and around the Open Source community. We also discuss the pros and cons of building an Open Source company and his philosophy on investing in Open Source Startups.

Highlights:

• Joseph introduces himself and discusses his background and how he started OSS Capital (0:48)
• How open source is beneficial and critical to any business (6:12)
• The origins and definition of open source and how to differentiate new technologies that expand on the concept (7:58)
• What most people think of when they say "Open Source Company" and Joseph's suggestion for a more accurate name (11:31)
• Why Commercial Open Source Companies are awesome (13:21)
• The challenges of building a Commercial Open Source Company (17:21)
• The importance of differentiating between your users and your customers (19:57)
• Freemium vs. Open Source (22:04)

Links:

Joseph 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/josephjacks/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/JosephJacks_
• Company: https://oss.capital/

Jon Gottfried, Co-founder of Major League Hacking, joins me to chat about community building, open source as a career accelerator, and how Major League Hacking began.

In this episode, Jon and I discuss the role of open source in Major League Hacking and the lessons maintainers can learn from new developers and vice versa. Jon also shares his thoughts on community, sharing responsibilities, and tips for ensuring the future of open source. Listen to hear his perspective and learn how Major League Hacking came to be. 

Highlights:

• Jon introduces himself and Major League Hacking (0:42)
• How Open Source fits into the work MLH does with developers entering the industry (1:44)
• How to be a successful open source contributor (3:20)
• Lessons maintainers can learn from the new developer experience (6:07)
• Jon shares his thoughts on community building (13:06)
• Jon shares his views on meeting in person vs. virtually (15:40)
• Sharing responsibilities in a business vs. an open source project (18:03)
• How contributing to an open source project can accelerate a career trajectory (21:48)
• How Major League Hacking began (24:01)

Links:

Jon

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonmarkgo/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/jonmarkgo
• Company: https://mlh.io/

Brian Douglas, CEO of OpenSauced, joins me to discuss insights - how they’ve been provided in the past, how OpenSauced is different, and how he hopes to contribute to the future of open source. 

In this episode, Brian and I explore the origins and future of OpenSauced, including his hopes for how providing different insights can help contributors find worthy projects and maintainers find worthy contributors to hire. We also discuss the importance of community and telling fairer and fuller stories of open source projects. Listen to hear Brian’s unique perspective on the business of open source.

Highlights:

• Brian introduces himself and OpenSauced (0:45)
• Brian describes his ideal OpenSauced users (4:42)
• How OpenSauced began and why Brian chose and stuck with the pizza theme (8:29)
• Why OpenSauced focuses on the contributor first (15:01)
• Using data to tell the full story of an open source project (18:44)
• Brian describes his target company size and use case (20:42)
• The value of the open source community (22:38)
• What companies get wrong when working with open source (24:42)

Links:

Brian

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianldouglas
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bdougieYO
• Company: https://opensauced.pizza/
• The Secret Sauce Podcast
  • Audio: https://thesecretsauce.transistor.fm/
  • YouTube: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHyZ0Wz_A44VR4BXl_JOWSecQeWcZ-kS3

Matt Butcher, CEO of Fermyon, joins me to discuss the ethics of open source and how to keep your company's health in mind when growing your business.

In this episode, Matt and I dig into the ethics of open source and how his background in philosophy influences the decisions he makes as a CEO. We also cover how you can intentionally create and maintain your company values and culture. Finally, Matt reveals his top mistakes as a CEO and how he's overcome them to improve his business. 

Highlights:

• Matt introduces himself and his background in open source and philosophy (0:47)
• How Matt's background in philosophy changed his perspective on the ethics of open source (3:14)
• How that background influences how they began and continue to run Fermyon (8:58)
• How to establish values for a new company and stick to them (15:16)
• Why Matt started Fermyon when he did and with the focus on web assembly (21:59)
• Matt reviews the top mistakes he made as a founder and how addressing them has helped him improve the company culture (26:44)

Links:

Matt

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattbutcher/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/technosophos
• Company: https://www.fermyon.com/
• Fermyon Discord: https://discord.com/invite/AAFNfS7NGf

Henrik Rosendahl, CEO of Spiio, joins me to chat about his experience as an entrepreneur and what he’s learned about building successful companies. 

In this episode, Henrik and I cover the many aspects of building startups. From the top mistakes new founders make to the best way to monetize your open source business. Listen to learn Henrik’s thoughts on entrepreneurship, including monetization, the three things you need to build a successful startup, and whether or not founding a startup should always feel like a struggle. 

Highlights:

• Henrik introduces himself and gives a brief overview of his experience as an entrepreneur. (0:43)
• The top mistakes entrepreneurs make building their first startup. (2:25)
• Monetization and valuable feedback from customers (9:05)
• How the relationship between the user and the buyer impacts startups. (14:27)
• Focusing on enterprise vs. a mid-market segment. (16:57)
• What’s next for Henrik (19:34)

Links:

Henrik

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hrosendahl
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/hrosendahl
• Company: https://www.spiio.com/

Today I’m talking with Fabian Pinckaers, CEO and Founder of Odoo, a suite of business apps to manage all of a business’s activities, about his passion for open source and knowing how and when to pivot as a start-up.

In this episode, Fabien and I discuss the highs and lows of running a start-up as he details his history with Odoo. From its inception as a service offering for auction houses to its current state as an open core software vendor with a cloud offering, Odoo has challenged its founder to continue innovating the product and pivoting the business model to find success. Listen in to discover the lessons Fabien has learned in his journey as a founder and CEO.

Highlights:

• Fabien introduces himself and explains how his passion for open source led him to start Odoo (0:49)
• Why Fabien agrees with other founders that open source is a development model, not a business model (5:09)
• How to keep going forward when your business is struggling. (9:53)
• Why Fabien believes that “product is everything,” and how that philosophy relates to his passion for open source (10:51)
• “Open source is about the masses” (14:06)
• Odoo’s three pivots (19:47)
• How pivoting to open core has allowed Odoo to contribute even more (24:17)

Links:

Fabien

• LinkedIn: https://be.linkedin.com/in/fpodoo
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/fpodoo
• Company: https://www.odoo.com/

Today I’m chatting with Nicklas Gellner, co-founder  of Medusa, “the open source Shopify alternative” about why he started the company, why open source, and his vision for the future.

In this episode, Nicklas details the original inspiration for Medusa as well as why they chose the name. We also review the switch from an agency to a product focused company.  When I mention the buzz around a relatively young company like Medusa, Nicklas emphasizes Medusa’s developer-first approach and explains how that encourages community development.

Highlights:

• Nicklas introduces himself and Medusa (0:46)
• Nicklas explains the original inspiration for Medusa’s creation (2:09)
• How Medusa differs from Shopify beyond being open source and its real value for developers (10:48)
• How and why Nicklas switched from and agency to a product focused company with Medusa (14:46)
• The buzz around Medusa (20:44)
• How Medusa’s developer-first approach encourages community development (22:53)
• Nicklas’s vision for Medusa’s growth in the coming years. (24:09)
• How they decided on the name “Medusa” (26:17)

Links:

Nicklas

• LinkedIn: https://dk.linkedin.com/in/ngellner
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/nicklasgellner?lang=en
• Company: https://medusajs.com/
• Medusa Community Discord: https://discord.com/invite/medusajs

Michael Chenetz, Head of Technical Marketing at Portainer.io, joins me to discuss why technical marketing is so much more effective for open source companies and also why it’s a hard role to fill. 

In this episode, Michael and I discuss his unique background that lead him to technical marketing in the open source space, and the importance of relating tech to people. Michael explains the differences between traditional marketing and technical marketing, as well as the impact technical marketing has on a company’s trajectory. 

Highlights:

• Michael introduces himself and his role at Portainer.io (00:52)
• The difference in perception and practice for technical marketing versus traditional marketing (02:39)
• Michael’s path to becoming a technical marketer (05:59)
• The open source behind Portainer and Michael’s learnings marketing an open source company (08:43)
• What Michael sees as the relationship between cloud native and open source (13:06)
• The different impacts technical marketing can have based on company size (18:44)
• Some of the biggest mistakes founders of open source companies make, according to Michael (21:36)

Links:

Michael

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mchenetz/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/mchenetz
• Company: https://portainer.io

Liz Rice, Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent, joins me to discuss the business model behind Cilium and the enjoyment she has found working in open source. 

In this episode, Liz and I discuss why Isovalent decided to donate Cilium to CNCF, and the additional decisions behind developing for Cilium open source versus Cilium for Enterprise. Tune into this episode to hear how entrepreneurship taught Liz what she didn’t enjoy doing so she could focus on work she enjoys, and what she finds most rewarding about working in open source.

Highlights:

• Liz introduces herself and describes her role as Chief Open Source Officer at Isovalent (00:55)
• Why Isovalent decided to donate Cilium to CNCF (02:11)
• What Liz sees as the relationship between cloud native and open source (07:43)
• Liz’s past experiences as an entrepreneur and how it led her to to where she is now (10:05)
• How Isovalent has evolved and grown into a company with enterprise product offerings (17:17)
• How decisions are made differently when developing the open-source version of Cilium versus the enterprise version (22:12)
• The gratification and value Liz has found working in open source (25:58)

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lizrice
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lizrice
• Github: https://github.com/lizrice
• Company: https://isovalent.com/
• Cilium: www.cilium.io
• eBPF: www.eBPF.io 

Andrew Aitken, Global Open Source Leader at Wipro, joins me to discuss the benefits and challenges that come with adopting open source as a large-scale enterprise organization. 

In this episode, Andrew and I discuss the three stages of open source maturity from curiosity to full-scale adoption and mastery. Tune into this episode to learn more about the trigger events that cause large-scale enterprises to explore open source, as well as the barriers and legal challenges they must overcome to effectively adopt it, and most importantly - why Andrew feels it’s so important that every large-scale enterprise goes through this process.

Highlights:

• Andrew introduces Wipro and explains what it means to be a Global Open Source Leader (00:52)
• The challenges Andrew helps his clients solve in the world of open source (03:16)
• How Andrew sees high-security companies like banks view and approach open source (04:28)
• Do Andrew’s clients view open source software as being more, less, or just as secure as closed source software? (07:41)
• The three different open-source maturity stages Andrew sees at large companies (10:47)
• Why Andrew feels most large enterprises would benefit from reaching full maturation in their open-source strategy (14:52)
• The biggest barriers Andrew sees companies run into when considering moving towards open-source maturity (17:53)
• Is being enterprise-ready truly a requirement for an open-source start-up? (20:52)
• The legalities of adopting open source as a large-scale enterprise (25:24)

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/opensourcestrategy/
• Email: [email protected]
• Company: https://www.wipro.com/

Randy Abernethy, Managing Director at RX-M, joins me for a chat about the relationship between open source and cloud native.
 

In this episode, Randy and I discuss how the clients he works with at RX-M are looking to cloud-native as part of their forward-thinking strategies. Tune into this episode to learn how Randy sees the C-Suite viewing open source, how he sees clients evaluate risk in open-source projects, and his views on the relationship between open source and cloud native.

Highlights:

• Randy introduces himself and his company, RX-M (00:46)
• Why do companies come to RX-M for help when evaluating and implementing cloud native? (03:44)
• How do RX-M clients approach open source? (9:35)
• What are the C-Suite’s views open source (16:19)
• How Randy’s clients evaluate risk in open-source projects (23:34)
• The role CNCF plays in how companies evaluate and implement cloud-native solutions (30:31)
• Randy’s view on the relationship between open source and cloud native (32:39)

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/randyabernethy/
• Twitter: @randyabernethy
• Company: www.rx-m.com

Ian Tien, CEO and Co-Founder of Mattermost, joins me to talk about how Mattermost went from being a video game company to an open-source messaging platform that provides collaboration for developers and other mission-critical teams. 

In this episode, Ian and I discuss the reality of product-led growth in open-source companies, Ian’s perspective on open source moving towards platform-based solutions, and the advice he would give to other open-source founders.  

Highlights:

• Ian introduces himself and the Mattermost open-source project (00:45)
• The use cases Ian sees for Mattermost (05:17)
• Ian takes us through the origin story of Mattermost and how it went from being a video game company to an open-source messaging solution (08:59)
• The role open source played in the success of Mattermost (15:07)
• Ian’s perspective on open source moving towards platform based solutions (20:22)
• Does Ian think the product-led growth model of “If you build it, they will come” is realistic, and how can that mentality lead to success? (27:34)
• The advice Ian would give other open-source founders (28:33)

Links:

Ian

• Twitter: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iantien/
• Company: https://www.mattermost.com

Amanda Brock, CEO of Open UK, joins me for an engaging conversation on best practices in founding an open-source company. 

In this episode, Amanda and I chat about the various business models available for building a company around open-source technology, the common pitfalls and crossroads open-source founders find themselves facing, and how to do open-source in a way that leads to long-term success and profitability. 

Highlights:

• What is Open UK? (00:40)
• The various business models for building a company around open-source technology (04:09)
• Which business models Amanda feels work best and why (08:07)
• The importance of founders prioritizing open-source communities (14:07)
• How and why to do open-source the right way (17:04)
• What is the true cost of founding an open-source company compared to traditional business models? (26:44)
• Who are you building for, and how do you get to profitability? (30:35)

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amandabrocktech/
• Twitter: www.twitter.com/amandabrocktech
• Open UK www.twitter.com/openuk_uk
• Company: www.openuk.uk

Wes McKinney, CTO & Co-Founder of Voltron Data, joins me for an in-depth conversation on how his quest to develop Python as an open-source programming language led him to creating the pandas project and founding four companies. 

In this episode, Wes and I dive into his unique background as the founder of the pandas project and he describes his perspective on the early days of Python, his journey into the world of open-source start-ups, and the risks and benefits of paying developers to work on open-source projects. 

Highlights:

• Wes introduces himself and describes his role (00:46)
• Wes’ role in elevating Python to a mainstream programming language (02:15)
• How working with Python led Wes to co-founding his first two companies (09:01)
• Apache Arrow’s critical role at Voltron Data and their focus on accelerating Arrow adoption (12:52)
• How did the team at Voltron Data decide on an open-source business model? (18:54)
• Wes speaks to the risk that can come from having developers work on an open-source project (22:31)
• Wes’ perspective on the real-world applications and benefits of paying developers to work on open-source projects (27:44)

Links:

Wes

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wesmckinn/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/wesmckinn
• Company: https://voltrondata.com/

Braden Hancock, Co-founder and Head of Technology at Snorkel AI, joins me to talk about his path from academia to start-up co-founder and his vision to make AI more accessible to both traditional and no-code development. 

In this episode, Braden and I explore the journey he and his co-founders took to go from having an interesting idea to forming a company and the strategic business decisions they made along the way, such as why they opted not to use an open-source business model and the educational marketing strategy they’ve adopted. 

Highlights:

• Braden discusses his role as co-founder of Snorkel AI. (00:25)
• An introduction to Snorkel Flow, Snorkel AI’s data-centric AI development program and the challenges they solve for. (01:49)
• Snorkel AI’s relationship with open source. (06:30)
• Why Snorkel AI decided not to use an open-source business model in order to lower the barrier to entry. (09:01)
• Snorkel AI’s trajectory coming from academia to the world of start-ups. (12:50)
• The unexpected challenges of building Snorkel AI. (17:50)
• Taking an educational approach to the marketing at Snorkel AI. (22:27)
• Braden discusses the meaningful applications of AI as well as where he sees AI being used as more of a buzzword. (27:27)

Links:

Braden

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradenhancock/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/bradenjhancock
• Company: snorkel.ai  
• Snorkel AI Twitter: https://twitter.com/SnorkelAI

Anna Filippova, Director of Community & Data at DBT Labs, joins me to chat about the fundamental role community plays in the world of open source and her role helping to create a thriving community. 

In this episode, Anna and I dive into the concept of a community: why it’s essential for open-source development, how to create business value through community, and how to track community health above and beyond user count. 

Highlights:

• Why community is mission critical at DBT Labs (02:07)
• The fundamental role open source played in creating DBT Labs as its known today (05:57)
• The approach DBT Labs uses to create business value through community (08:13)
• Anna’s framework for the three buckets of communities (09:42)
• Why measuring and tracking community health is a more valuable metric than just user count (11:34)
• What do people get out of communities, and why are they so valuable?  (19:06)
• Common misconceptions around building communities as a business strategy (24:19)

Links:

• Anna
  •  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annafilippova/
  • Twitter: https://twitter.com/anna_fil
• DBT Labs: getdbt.com/community
• Coalesce Conference: https://coalesce.getdbt.com/

Highlights:

• Open source software at the department of defense (1:36)
• Is there risk associated with using open source software in the department of defense? (5:30)
• Does the public sector contribute to and participate in open source communities? (9:13)
• Rob’s background and work experience (14:25)
• What led Rob to found Defense Unicorns (16:35)
• Rob’s focus on a specific niche in the founding of his company (17:33)
• How working with a fixed budget affects an open source company (19:33)

Links:

Rob

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/robertcslaughter/
• Company: https://www.defenseunicorns.com/

Ricardo Mendoza, founder and CEO of Pantacor, joins me for a chat at the Open Source Summit in Austin. Ricardo shares why he started Pantacor and describes the differences between IoT, edge, connected, and embedded devices. I ask him how Pantacor fits into the edge continuum, and he explains how Pantacor helps bring embedded devices into the future. Ricardo talks about the open source arm of Pantacor’s strategy, we discuss Pantacor’s unique interest in hardware versus primarily dealing with software, and Ricardo wraps up by sharing his advice for aspiring business owners! 

Highlights:

• Why Ricardo started Pantacor (1:19)
• Difference between IOT edge devices, connected devices, and embedded devices (2:17)
• How Pantacor fits into the edge continuum (4:49)
• Why are embedded systems lagging behind and how does that manifest? (6:22)
• How open source is part of Pantacor’s strategy (9:40)
• How aware are manufacturers of their operating systems and how Pantacor could help them? (13:35)
• Pantacor’s relationship with hardware  (16:45)
• What was the inspiration for the founding of Pantacor? (20:11)
• The difference between cloud developers and their relationship with open source versus the relationship between embedded devices and open source (22:46)
• Is there a disadvantage to being based in Europe? (24:51)
• Advice for someone who wants to start a company or work with embedded devices (26:28)

Links:

Pantacor

• https://pantacor.com/
• https://pantavisor.io/
• Twitter: @pantahub

Live from the Open Source Summit in Austin, I sit down with Jeff Shapiro, the License Scanning Manager for the Linux Foundation. Jeff begins by explaining what he does at the Linux Foundation, including ensuring that open source licenses are compatible and compliant. We discuss what license issues start-ups should be aware of, how to educate yourself on open source licensing, and when you should consult an expert. Jeff clarifies some confusion around dual licenses and explains the challenges of changing licenses on an open source project. Finally, we discuss the possibilities of disallowing specific uses through licensing and who can write a license. 

Highlights:

• Jeff talks about the legal and business risks of non-compliant open source licenses (3:09)
• License issues start-ups should be aware of (7:16)
• DCO (Developer certificate of origin) and understanding where code comes from (12:10)
• Educating yourself and others about open source licenses (13:04)
• Jeff talks about when you need to consult an expert (15:36)
• Jeff explains how he got into licensing as an engineer (17:23)
• Jeff discusses dual licenses (18:18)
• How hard is it to change licenses on an open source project (20:23)
• Jeff explains if it’s possible to disallow specific uses with your license (23:39)

Links:

Jeff

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffcshapiro/
• Company: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/

Today I sit down with Webb Brown, CEO and cofounder of Kubecost. Kubecost provides real-time cost visibility and insights for teams using Kubernetes. Webb tells the story of building Kubecost, starting with the pain points that inspired the open source tool. He talks about the transition from an open source project to becoming a commercial company, and explains the decision to build a company with the same name and branding as the open source tool. Webb talks about Kubecost’s newest initiative, OpenCost, and concludes by offering some lessons and advice for anyone in the early days of an open source startup. 

Highlights:

• Webb explains what Kubernetes cost is (1:27)
• How the pain points addressed by Kubecost usually manifest (3:04)
• What the impetus was for building the Kubecost open source tool (5:30)
• The transition from open source to commercial (6:54)
• The relationship between a cost-cutting tool and open source (10:48)
• Kubecost’s new initiative, OpenCost (13:40)
• The decision to have a company with the same name as the open source project (18:55)
• Pros and cons that are unique to building an open source company (22:08)
• Advice for anyone in the early stages of an open source startup (25:22)

Links:

Webb

• Email: [email protected] 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/webbbrown/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/webb_brown
• Company: https://www.kubecost.com/

Today I sit down with Ev Kontsevoy, the CEO and co-founder of Teleport, a software company that began as an open source project. Teleport is an identity aware multi protocol access proxy that Ev was inspired to create because of the inherent frustrations with security he experienced in his career. Ev talks about how Teleport began as an open source tool and then grew into enterprise. I ask Ev what things he has done differently from his first start-up, Gravity, and we discuss how the open source community culture has bled into the company culture at Teleport. We end by talking about the SaaS version of Teleport and the ways in which the open source version funnels business into the commercial version. 

Highlights:

• Security frustrations that led to the founding of Teleport (1:17)
• Ev talks about Teleport’s vision and how it began as an open source project (6:33)
• Ev talks about Teleport’s first customer and a separate open source project, Gravity (12:09)
• How Ev’s experience with a prior start-up changed his approach to Teleport (18:24)
• Ev discusses the culture and community at Teleport (21:16)
• How Teleport chooses which features to keep open source and which ones to offer as commercial (24:38)
• The SaaS version of Teleport (26:55)
• The different audiences for the different iterations of Teleport (28:08)

Links:

Ev Kontsevoy

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kontsevoy/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kontsevoy
• Company: goteleport.com

Today I’m joined by Cillian Kieran, the CEO and co-founder of Ethyca, to talk about the privacy challenges that served as the impetus to found Ethyca. In our chat, he explains the overarching goals of the privacy engineering platform. We discuss the decision to begin Ethyca as an open source tool and why that was critical to the mission. Then we talk about the decision to move to a commercial product and how to decide which features to offer as paid versus free. Cillian reviews the differences in his process between his two start-ups, discusses lessons he learned from prior mistakes, and provides advice for aspiring founders of open source start-ups. 

Highlights:

• How Cillian decided to found Ethyca (00:50)
• Awareness of developers and engineers around privacy issues (3:46)
• Cillian talks about why he went the open source route (8:15)
• Moving from open source to commercial product (14:02)
• Privacy as a human right and how that influences development of features (16:32)
• How Ethyca manages relationships between engineer and legal teams (19:40)
• What Cillian did differently at his two start-ups (21:58)
• We discuss open source start-up success and whether it’s necessary to have a larger world-changing vision (24:52)
• Cillian discusses mistakes he has learned from (27:56)
• Cillian offers advice to aspiring founders in the open source community (30:49)

Links:

• Fides open source platform: fid.es

Cillian

• Twitter: @Cillian
• Company: https://ethyca.com/

Today I’m joined by CEO and founder of LeanIX, André Christ. André begins by describing his business, and then explains how his experiences working in large enterprise inspired him to build a product that would help businesses catalogue their software and optimize their portfolios. André offers advice for companies desiring to sell primarily to enterprise and expounds on the his experience with the differences between traditional enterprise and large enterprise. We discuss LeanIX’s transition to become a global company based in Europe, and conclude our talk with some advice from André to potential founders. 

Highlights:

• André describes his his company LeanIX (00:48)
• The experiences that led André to found LeanIX (2:50)
• LeanIX’s decision to focus on enterprise customers (7:45)
• Advice for companies that want to focus on selling to enterprise (9:47)
• The difference between traditional enterprise and very large enterprise like Amazon (15:19)
• Transitioning to becoming a global company based in Europe (19:49)
• The surprisingly fragmented world of global tech (24:50)
• LeanIX’s decision to expand into other products (26:30)
• André’s advice for anyone considering starting a company (27:57)
• André shares about scaling mistakes and how LeanIX has learned from them (31:48)

Links:

André

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrechrist/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/christ_andre
• Company: https://www.leanix.net/

Today I chat with Keith Basil, GM of Edge Computing at SUSE. We begin by reviewing the definition of edge: Keith explains how SUSE breaks edge computing down into 3 categories, and then talks about the shared understanding of edge by the industry at large. I ask Keith about the overlap of edge products with non-edge products, and then we discuss the maturity of the edge landscape and Keith explains how SUSE helps clients with infrastructure. We wrap up by talking about managing feature bloat and SUSE’s decision to have their entire code base be open sourced. 

Highlights:

• Keith breaks down the 3 categories of “edge” as defined at SUSE (1:14)
• We discuss the industry understanding of edge technology (5:34)
• Keith defines “edge watching” (8:44)
• We discuss the relationship between cloud native and edge native (10:22)
• The overlap of edge products and non-edge products (14:25)
• The maturity of the edge landscape and how SUSE help clients with infrastructure (17:04)
• How SUSE manages feature bloat (23:37)
• SUSE’s decision to have their entire code base be open sourced (26:15)

Links:

Keith

• Twitter: @noslzzp
• Company: https://www.suse.com/

Today I talk with Shaun O’Meara, the global field CTO at Mirantis. We begin by discussing the integration of Docker Enterprises with Mirantis approximately three years ago. We discuss the challenges of integrating companies, including incorporating new technology, processes, and customers and merging two very different work cultures. Shaun offers his advice for anyone considering selling to enterprises and emphasizes the role of partnering with customers and becoming part of their process. Shaun talks about the expectations and realities of merging Docker and Mirantis, including the challenges of a licensing model change. We conclude our time by discussing the differences between selling to small companies versus selling to enterprises. 

Highlights:

• How integrating Docker Enterprises with Mirantis affected Shaun’s role as CTO (1:09)
• How incorporating Docker technology helped Mirantis build different value for customers (3:39)
• We talk about the effects of combining the work cultures of Docker and Mirantis (5:40)
• Shaun offers advice for people considering start ups or selling to enterprise, including the importance of partnering with customers (8:47)
• Shaun talks about his expectations of merging Docker and Mirantis versus reality (12:56)
• We talk about the licensing model change through the transition (14:34)
• Shaun talks about outsourcing versus what Mirantis does in augmenting and supporting teams (17:55)
• We discuss the differences between selling to small companies and enterprise (20:06)

Links:

Shaun

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shaun-omeara/
• Company: https://www.mirantis.com/

Today I sit down and chat with John McBride, senior software engineer at VMware. We begin by talking about John’s address at KubeCon, “Risks of Single Maintainer Dependencies and How to Mitigate Those Risks.” We discuss the definition of security and then John identifies some of the other non-security risks posed by single maintainer dependency. We talk a little bit about mitigating the risks and about building trust and community around single maintainer projects. We conclude our time by speculating on the extinction of single maintainer dependencies. 

Highlights:

• John introduces himself and talks about his interest in mitigating the risks of single maintainer dependencies (00:55)
• We have a conversation about the definition of security (4:54)
• John talks about the other, non-security risks of single maintainer dependency (10:00)
• We discuss how to mitigate the risks of single maintainer dependency (12:04)
• John talks about building trust and building community around single maintainer projects (16:48)
• John answers my question “Do you think being a single maintainer is ultimately an anti-pattern, a non best practice?” (23:56)

Links:

John

• Twitter: @johncodezzz
• Company: https://www.vmware.com

Today I talk with Catherine Paganini, Head of Marketing and Community at Buoyant. We begin by discussing the Cloud Native Glossary and how it is helping to make cloud native concepts more accessible for people around the world. Catherine talks about nurturing community in open source projects, and about the function of documentation. Catherine and I discuss pitfalls in building open source communities, and Catherine talks about her strategy for recovering from mistakes. Catherine concludes the conversation by talking about balancing her roles as head of marketing and community at Buoyant.

Highlights:

• Catherine talks about how the Cloud Native Glossary started, how it has grown, and how it helps to make education about the cloud accessible and easy to understand  (1:00)
• Catherine discusses about how the Cloud Native Glossary is being used (5:47)
• Catherine and I talk about nurturing community in an open source project (8:22)
• Catherine discusses empowering end users through efforts like the Linkerd Anchor Program (11:28)
• Catherine talks about the function of documentation (14:05)
• I ask Catherine, “What do you see people getting wrong when it comes to nurturing community?” (15:29)
• Catherine talks about recovering from mistakes (18:49)
• Catherine discusses walking the line between being head of marketing and head of community (23:47)

Links:

Cloud Native Glossary: https://glossary.cncf.io/

Linkerd: https://linkerd.io/

Linkerd Anchor Program: https://linkerd.io/community/anchor/

Catherine

• LinkedIn: Catherine Paganini
• Twitter: @cathpaga
• Company: https://www.buoyant.io

Today I talk with Yann Léger, CEO of Koyeb, the serverless developer platform that allows businesses to safely and easily deploy applications. We begin by talking about Yann’s decision to base the company on serverless, and the true meaning of cloud native. Yann then discusses Koyeb’s relationship with Kuma, and Koyeb’s posture towards open source projects. The conversation concludes with Yann sharing mistakes he’s learned from in the process of building Koyeb and offering advice to other potential technical founders. 

Highlights:

• Yann talks about the decision to leave his position at Scaleway and start his own company (1:44)
• Yann discusses choosing to base his company on serverless (3:14)
• Emily and Yann talk about the meaning of cloud native (6:00)
• Yann talks about Koyeb’s relationship with Kuma (9:40)
• Yann discusses Koyeb’s open source projects (11:46)
• Yann shares mistakes he has learned from in the process of building Koyeb (15:25)
• Yann answers the question “What are the disadvantages of being a technical founder?” (18:06)
• Emily and Yann discuss the challenges of remote working (22:00)
• Yann’s advice for anyone considering becoming a technical founder (23:15)

Links:

Yann

• LinkedIn: Yann Léger
• Twitter: @yann_eu, @gokoyeb
• Company: https://www.koyeb.com/

Today I chatted with Dirk Hohndel, chief open source officer at the Cardano foundation. We begin by defining an open source ecosystem, and then talk about what different open source ecosystems might look like and how they are maintained. Dirk talks about best practices for steering an open source ecosystem, and then we discuss the role of foundations in open source projects. I ask “how do you define success for an open source project” and we end with a discussion on the best practices for running open source project foundations.

Highlights:

• We talk about the meaning and maintenance of an open source ecosystem (1:31)
• The differences between an open source ecosystem and a community (11:06)
• Dirk talks about best practices for steering an open source ecosystem (13:00)
• The role of a foundation in an open source project (18:04)
• Dirk discusses other iterations of open source projects that can be successful (22:19)
• Dirk answers the question “how do you define success for an open source project?” (24:43)
• We discuss best practices for running an open source project foundation (27:49)

Links:

Dirk 

• Twitter: @_dirkh
• Company: cardanofoundation.org

Today I sit down with Romaric Philogène, CEO and founder of Qovery, a platform that helps developers build, deploy, run, and scale applications.  Romaric begins by talking about his first two start-ups, both social networks, and then we discuss the difference between creating consumer-facing products and products for developers. We then talk about marketing in the US as it compares to the global market. We discuss Qovary’s relationship to open source and the idea of fostering community around a company’s culture. Romaric concludes by offering advice to developers on the value of being a skilled communicator. 

Full Description / Show Notes

Highlights:

• Romaric talks about his first two startups that preceded Qovery (3:26)
• The differences between building a consumer facing product and creating a product for developers (5:55)
• Romaric talks marketing in the US vs marketing in Europe  (11:50)
• Romaric answers the question “what are things you’re doing differently now that you’ve learned from previous efforts?” (17:00)
• The value of community building in marketing to developers (19:28)
• Qovary’s relationship with open source (20:46)
• Building community around your company vs just a product (25:00)
• The importance of communication as an engineer (28:47)

Links:

Romaric

• Twitter:@rophilogene
• Company: https://www.qovery.com/

Today I’m chatting with Avery Pennarun, CEO of Tailscale. Tailscale is a VPN service that makes devices and applications accessible anywhere in the world by enabling encrypted point-to-point connections using the open source WireGuard protocol. Avery begins by talking about his experience building a start-up while he was a college student and how things have changed as he leads his current start-up. Avery recommends the book “Crossing the Chasm” and we discuss market segmentation as it relates to creating a successful start-up. Avery explains how Tailscale has been successful in implementing market segmentation strategies. We conclude our conversation by talking about goal setting and the importance of quality.

Highlights:

• Avery talks about his first start-up experience as a college student (1:10)
• Avery recommends “Crossing the Chasm” and discusses how it influenced his start-ups (7:54)
• We discuss market segmentation strategy (13:29)
• Specific marketing strategies used at Tailscale (18:41)
• Avery talks about mistakes he’s made while building his start-ups (22:24)
• Goal setting in start-ups (24:42)
• We talk about the importance of quality in building word of mouth success (29:49)
• Avery answers the question “How do you maintain an identity as an engineer when you are also a serial entrepreneur?” (33:23)

Links:

Avery

• Twitter: @apenwarr @tailscale
• Company: https://www.tailscale.com

Today I chat with Kiersten Gaffney, CMO of Codefresh, a software delivery platform. Kiersten begins by defining her role as CMO. We then discuss the unique challenges of product strategy with open source projects. Kiersten talks about the importance of maintaining both a top-down and bottom-up approach when taking a project from open source to enterprise, and then explains some of the most common mistakes she’s seen when companies undergo this process. We discuss how technical a team should be when marketing open source and conclude the conversation by talking about analysis paralysis in start-ups and how to avoid it. 

Highlights:

• Kiersten answers the question “What do CMOs do all day?” (1:49)
• Product strategy with open source products (2:58)
• How open source projects fit into marketing efforts (6:10)
• Kiersten’s advice on how to maintain both a top-down and bottom-up approach (11:28)
• Is there a magic formula for taking a project from open source to for profit? (13:02)
• Biggest mistakes when taking a project from open source to enterprise (15:54)
• Emily asks how technical a marketing team should be for an open source project (22:53)
• Kiersten and Emily discuss the tension between engineering and marketing (24:24)
• Analysis paralysis in startups (26:35)

Links:

Kiersten

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kierstengaffney/
• Twitter: @kierstengaffney
• Company: https://codefresh.io/

In this short summation episode, I talked a little more about why I think Deepfence's open source strategy is so genius. 

Today I sat down with Sandeep Lahane, founder and CEO of Deepfence, a security preventive and detective solution for cloud and container native environments. Sandeep began by explaining both the open source and enterprise components of Deepfence. Threatmapper is a multi-cloud platform for scanning, mapping, and ranking vulnerabilities in running containers, images, hosts, and repositories, and Threatstryker is a commercial product that offers runtime attack analysis, threat assessment, and targeted protection for infrastructures and applications. We then talk about the inexhaustibility and the ever-changing landscape of cybersecurity. Sandeep explains the impetus for launching Deepfence and the process of getting to Threatmapper and Threatstryker, and then talks about his journey from working as a systems programmer to launching a tech startup. We discuss the tense relationship between security and development in the industry, and end the conversation with some words of advice for engineers considering the entrepreneurial plunge.

Highlights:

• What is the difference between Threatmapper and Threatstryker at Deepfence? (00:55)
• Sandeep explains how the Deepfence commission product builds upon the open source one (2:14)
• Discussing the inexhaustibility of the cybersecurity landscape (11:40)
• The genesis of Deepfence (13:58)
• Sandeep discusses the business benefits of having an open source project (14:57)
• Sandeep talks about his journey from systems programmer to tech startup (17:20)
• Emily and Sandeep discuss the tense relationship between security and development (21:19)
• Sandeep gives advice to engineers considering entrepreneurship (33:57)

Links:

Sandeep

• https://deepfence.io

Some short thoughts on marketing in the open source ecosystem, drawn from my conversation with Eric on Wednesday. 

Today I sit down with Eric Hendricks, the technical marketing director at Red Hat. Red Hat delivers open source solutions that make it easier for enterprises to work across platforms and environments. Eric begins the conversation by discussing his start as a technologist and how he decided to make the move to marketing. Eric then discusses the challenges of bringing marketing savvy into the devops space, including the unintended consequences of marketing buzzwords. I ask Eric about the relationship between marketing and open source, and Eric talks about how many of Red Hat’s community marketing efforts are driven through upstream communities. We then discuss the concept of the buyer in open source versus start ups, and how the difference is that the “big ask” in open source projects is emotional investment. Eric concludes the conversation by talking about the impact of his current role as a technical marketer as compared to the impact of a founder or IC. 

Highlights:

• Eric answers the question “At what point did you start to see yourself and did other people see you as a marketer?” (5:53)
• The stigma around marketing and the problem with marketing buzzwords in devops (10:22)
• Emily and Eric discuss the shared vocabulary problem that can arise with newer concepts in tech (14:35)
• Eric talks about equipping his product’s “champions” with all the resources they need to communicate need and efficacy to potential buyers (15:39)
• Emily asks Eric about the relationship between marketing and open source (19:50)
• Emily and Eric discuss the concept of “the buyer” with open source (25:14)
• Eric answers the question: “how are you able to have more of an impact in your current role than you would as an IC?” (29:30)

Links:

• Personal website: www.itguyeric.com
• Company website: www.redhat.com
• Twitter: @itguyeric
• Company: @rhel
• Podcasts: RHEL Presents, Into the Terminal

I'm trying something new this week — adding an extra episode with some key takeaways from the interview earlier in the week. In this one, I talked about the education battle many cloud native companies face, the problem of open source projects that are too good and understanding pain points for different personas. 

Today I’m joined by Omri Gazitt, founder of Aserto, an authorization company that offers cloud native authorization as a service. We discuss the differences between ID authorization and authentication and the problems associated with educating developers on the distinctions. Omri also talks about the evolution of authorization from server software all the way to cloud native authorization. He then expounds on the strategic nature of the decision to open source or not, and offers advice to developers based on his experience as both an engineer and an executive. 

Highlights:

• The beginnings of Aserto (7:50)
• Omri talks about what it was like to be part of a startup, Neon, in the 90s (10:49)
• Emily and Omri discuss what authorization was like pre-cloud native (13:32)
• How integration became the strategy used by Aserto to begin to solve authorization problems (17:10)
• The decision to open source and how organizations should be strategic when considering open source  (18:55)
• Omri discusses his unique perspective as both a former tech engineer and executive in forming his start-up (25:08)
• Omri talks about a missed opportunity in the early stages of Aserto (28:56)

Links:

Omri

• LinkedIn:
• Twitter
• Company

I’m joined by Mark Grover, one of the founders of Stemma, a data catalogue for building decentralized data informed cultures. In essence it is a “Google Search” built for data scientists, data analyst, business leaders, and more. Stemma is striving to solve data documentation and relevance issues by keeping data cataloguing up to date and current.

In this episode Mark covers his transition from the data team at Lyft to establishing Stemma. He discusses how he identified the need for a source of truth for ETA data, and how the data scientist in these teams should be the end all for this knowledge. Starting with building Amundsen, Stemma expands on the groundwork laid there to bring data to the user and open-source community’s needs.

Highlights:

• An introduction to Mark and Stemma (00:00)
• The history of Stemma (00:45)
• How open source helped solved data cataloguing problems (4:40)
• The decision to found Stemma (07:40)
• How Stemma’s relationship with Amundsen has evolved (13:20)
• The unexpected challenges and unexpected eases (18:35)
• Navigating the co-founding experience (23:35)
• Mark’s vision for Stemma’s future (28:54)
• Mark’s tips for aspiring founders (32:54)

Links:

Mark

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Company

I’m joined by Matt Leray, co-founder and CTO Speedscale, an API testing product that applies “real world” stresses to “collect and replay traffic without scripting, simulate load and chaos, and measure performance.” With a history steeped in various aspects of tech, and with time spent in the startup space and cloud native space, Matt brings to the table some encompassing perspectives.

Matt’s career has carried him from monitoring satallite earth stations, to fiber optics, and more recently into cloud native. Matt began in startups, then went to larger companies, then back to startups, which he offers some insight on. Matt has a lot of wisdom to share on entrepreneurship, how the startup space has changed, and how to best navigate that. Matt discusses how Speedscale works as an “traffic replay” platform for APIs and his role there both technically and as a co-founder. Check out the conversation for a list of startup how-tos!

Highlights:

• Introduction to Matt and Speedscale (00:00)
• When Matt decided to become an entrepreneur (02:10)
• Deciding to jump into startups (06:00)
• What has stayed the same, and what has changed for Matt’s entrepreneurship (10:00)
• Being selective (14:00)
• Nailing down the timing and finding the right moment for Speedscale (20:26)
• Matt’s most controversial view about the cloud native startup space (26:25)
• Matt’s final thoughts (30:18)

Links:

Matt

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Company

Kit Merker, co-founder and COO at Nobl9, a software reliability platform. Through software-defined SLO’s Nobl9 helps developers, DevOps and reliability engineers deliver more reliable features faster. Kit has had a storied career in tech, and as a result is a great source of wisdom and know how. Especially in regard to navigating the various sides of any given business. 

In this episode, Kit offers up some anecdotes from his long history in the software space, and how he transitioned from engieenering to the “business side” of things. He tears down some stereotypical misrepresentations of both sides, and expands on how empathy helps alleviate many of these issues. Kit discusses his partnership experiences, work in M&A, building a “coalition” in open space, and more! Tune in for our conversation for Kit’s emphatic and valuable insight.

Highlights:

• Introduction to Kit and Nobl9 (00:00)
• Why Kit decided to transition to the “business side” (03:55)
• Kit’s reflections on partnerships (06:30)
• The importance of building a coalition around Kubernetes (10:00)
• Alleviating developer burnout (18:15)
• Nobl9 and how it came to be and how they work (20:15)
• The challenges of being a consultant first (27:00)
• Recognizing the margins (33:30)

Links:

Kit

• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Nobl9

Michael Guarino, founder of Plural, a unified platform for open-source management platform entirely hosted on Kubernetes which creates a fully functional ecosystem around deploying Airflow. Though working in Kubernetes and more, Plural can be used across a wide spectrum of open source projects. Many of which Plural is specifically targeting to make their product appealing to users.

In this episode, Michael talks about how Plural works within the open-source space, and how in using it with Airflow they’ve helped to elminate much of the work needed there. Michael lays out how using Plural makes using Airflow easier on the user, versus taking a DYI approach. Michael discusses avoiding lock-in, the various open source tools they use, working through the early days in COVID,  the history of building Plural, and more!

Highlights:

• Introduction to Michael and Plural (00:00)
• The open source projects that work with Plural and its advantages (01:30)
• How using Plural is easier than DYI and avoiding lock-in (04:06)
• How Plural came to be (08:26)
• The unexpected difficulties, and the unexpected ease (15:06)
• Plural and open-source (18:40)
• Navigating potential roadblocks to community building (23:09)
• Monetization (26:20)
• Michael’s thoughts on the future of open-source (28:11)

Links:

Michael

• LinkedIn
• Plural