The Business of Open Source

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...

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...

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 dis...

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....

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 th...

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...

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 thin...

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...

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...

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...

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 mod...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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 abo...

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,...

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 th...

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 o...

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 Su...

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...

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 Unleashe...

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 Busin...

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 jetpac...

"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 sustaina...