What’s AI Doing for Me?
As a CPO, I’m "AI-pilled" but find LLMs struggle to impact my manager’s schedule. While ICs see 10x gains, leadership work is hard to automate.
Mo's Blog About Open Source, SaaS, Startups
Random thoughts + ideas on technology, startups, open source, and building companies
Latest posts
Talend - the Next Cloud Success Story?
Talend did a fantastic job in their first arc - building an open-source community, monetizing its proprietary product, and going public. Their second arc is all about reinventing themselves as a cloud/SaaS vendor, and so far, it’s going much better than their stock would indicate.
5 Tricks to Bootstrap Your Open-Source Community
In conversations with founders, one question came up repeatedly: "How do you build a community around an open-source project?"
Fundraising for Open Source Startups
Focus on finding project-market-fit before moving on to building a proprietary product. The proprietary product builds on the success of the project.
SaaS and Moving Downmarket - MongoDB’s Transformation
MongoDB went public as a self-managed software vendor in 2017. In the following years, it transformed itself as a SaaS vendor and moved down-market.
Red Hat’s Business Model was an Outlier
Red Hat is often mentioned as the “original” open source vendor. Yet, nobody who applied the Red Hat model became a runaway success.
Open Core - Monetize Through First Principles
Open core has a “built-in conflict” between the open source project, the community, and the commercial vendor. Managing this conflict properly is crucial for the success of your company. It will help tremendously if you derive what goes into open source vs. what’s proprietary from first principles.
1on1s - A Simple Framework
1on1s aren’t rocket science. Yet, it still makes sense to put a basic structure in place.
Elastic - An Open Source Powerhouse
Elastic is growing faster than its peers, on top of higher absolute numbers. Particularly the last 2–3 quarters before the S-1 filings are outstanding. That’s both promising, as well as setting high expectations for the post-IPO results.
GitHub Is Doing Much Better Than Bloomberg Thinks - Here Is Why
Bloomberg’s article caught my eye, and I looked into how GitHub is performing. All metrics are from Eric Newcomer’s Bloomberg article and tweets.
Hiring - the Single Most Important Skill as a Founder
Summarizing a successful startup in one sentence is simple: Great people build great products, get great customers, and eventually build a great company.