YouSaid · the spoken record

James Governor

lines on the record: 59
first: 2017-04-11
most recent: 2017-04-11
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Martine said one of the most brilliant things, which I was sitting at home listening to the podcast cheering on, which he said, there's so much metadata in a microservice now that you could change the way you think about networks. That is these fundamental shifts that if you catch something like that.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I would add to that things that you could tangentially apply to previous architectures don't necessarily carry forward, right? I mean, like often we're like, oh, this worked for VMs, therefore it works for containers. And so I do think that you really need to be piped into the nervous system of the evolution of the market and you really need to be bold about kind of going after new solutions that are part of the evolving landscape.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the trade off that you're going to make as an entrepreneur is to come out into an existing trend with a lot of people having already validated that. That was easy to get into that trend. It wasn't a big risk. So I think the challenge for entrepreneurs is trading off like a vision of change that will happen over the next couple of years that you're going to grow into versus just joining an existing parade around a standard open source community. Yeah.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, last question then. You started off describing how you've been through two sort of failures before you kind of struck the right model for building a great software company, not necessarily a great open source company. What advice would you give to entrepreneurs today who are trying to do the same thing or the next thing”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we got incredible lift off of open source. For instance, IBM showed up and standardized on what we were doing, HP, SAP, other people. We got huge liftoff of open source. That doesn't mean that you have to accept the usual low-end tarball and support contract business model. So I would probably not start a closed source software company today unless I had a very niche novel idea that I felt no one else would try to do. Because quickly there'll be an open source alternative to what you're trying to do if you do not open source it.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So they're creating Acme Inc. They've got a software project they think is going to change the world and they have a decision to do open source or close source. Is there a difference or is it the exact same thing?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, that's great to get back to this original question, which is a lot of the constituent that listens to this podcast or entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs or existing entrepreneurs. So let's say one of these entrepreneurs wants to create a company, Acme Inc., and they have great naming there. That's right. Because I'm creative.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what buyers are trying to escape from, and one reason they want open source as a protective measure, even if they don't use it, is the right to keep using their software without paying more and more for it every year. Companies like Oracle have been out there charging more and more for the same usage over the last few years. So they basically trap you into that and say, well, we can increase your unit costs, even if you're decreasing your unit consumption.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's close to a requirement, I think, for major new bets. Like if you look at our biggest buyers, they don't want to get into what Oracle is doing to them right now. Like every year they're using less Oracle and every year they're paying as much. That's a very negative feedback loop.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what I'm hearing is Actually, right, which is like, listen, there's an industry trend. You're going to build real value added in that trend, and you're going to go from the top down direct sales force. And this is really about kind of top down, like strategy and planning and not just kind of progressive community.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, this goes to my question of product vision, like having someone to direct it top line. Well, what I'm hearing is a next Steve Jobs will be the Steve Jobs of an open source company. Good. Because it's a great CEO, great product guy, great business. It doesn't have to be open source or closed source. It's to your point, it's building a great software company. Exactly right.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a critical architecture. Another thing that I like about your view and all this, it seems like it's a very kind of planned top-down view, which often discussions around open source to me are very organic, which is, you know, you get a community and that community will grow. This is kind of very kind of like organic progressive thing. This goes to my question process.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Community development is really important. But if you just develop a little community and it doesn't change a CIO, a CTO, anyone that's writing a series checks priorities, like by definition, you didn't build a software company that had an opportunity to be the big new strategic advisor. That's a critical critical.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I really like about your view on this conversation is you're basically saying open source or not open source. You have to build a solution that solves a real problem, take advantage of a trend. It's like traditional software company and software sales. And then open source provides uplift and et cetera. And often open source has been viewed very differently, like it's got something magic that will save you. And so what you would see is you see these incumbents that are desperate and like in an act of desperation, this swan song is to release something open source because they think that somehow that's going to magically save them.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We worked on that and then the next thing I saw was within the spring group, there was something called TC Server, which is just cheaper middleware. And it only got to, say, tens of millions of dollars in sales and an average selling price of say $80,000 somewhere in that range. And it never caught a strategic new design point either. So, when we had PCF, I really said, hey, this microservices refactory is actually a once in a generation change. We could take a different tact.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a great learning experience for me because I think Jonathan Schwartz had a fairly early and simplistic open source strategy. And he was like, We're an open source company. The problem was that Sun was still on the wrong side of all the trends. Like it was actually late to x86. It was late to everything that was happening around WebScale. And so open source actually only hurt us in a sense because working on monetizing Open Solaris, one day Jonathan said, it's all free. It's no longer licensed. Go sell support contracts. Everyone will buy support. Well, what happened was that overnight, like hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue evaporated. And then it was a tactical challenge to go get people to sign up for it again. Yeah. We didn't have some strategic initiative to go talk to them about.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For all of the time it's been in market, Red Hat is still a $2 billion year software company, right? If you compare it to what IBM or Oracle or SAP or Microsoft or any of the megas, they still haven't caught that size of a trend, even though their prices, frankly, are similar to Microsoft's now, like $2,500 and OS. So it's not that they're just down market, is they just didn't catch a trend big enough to become a company that big. I don't think they, you know, in the same way that the mainframe captured all of the world's transactional processing or Oracle captured all relational database apps and enterprises.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So let's talk about Red Hat because Red Hat seems to not follow. There's a big transformation. Open source is a great way to do that because it gives you an edge with community, all the bromides that we normally talk about. So you take advantage of the transformation. You become a strategic advisor, et cetera. But if you look in the back, that's kind of like the one success case doesn't really follow that”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes people say, Oh, well, why is enterprise software so expensive? It's expensive because the trust model of enterprise buyers is you're really going to take care of them, advise them, ensure outcomes. You're not just providing support. So what you're really fighting for is the chance to be one of those new trusted architectural advisors, I believe.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think the commodifying open source companies did a really good job of normalizing open source as something that people did and even created an expectation that that's the right way of going. And then this wave of what you might call the microservices generation or the cloud generation open source companies are actually catching enterprises with a new need. And a new, you might call it hundreds of billions of dollar need. And suddenly IBM and Oracle's earnings are missing every time. And suddenly, these new companies are getting green shoots.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fixing problems is fixing problems whether you do it in open source or closed source. And the reason that we're seeing this rise in open source companies is not endemic to open source. It's the fact that we're seeing actually a transformation of developers and their aesthetic and technology.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to push back on this one. Isn't that inherent in open source? Because that has to do with the nature of a community, the speed of development, the fact that you don't have to necessarily go through a waterfall type of development process. I mean, isn't there something here that's inherent to open source by definition?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're saying that it's not inherent in open source. It's actually inherent in the trend that's going on. And open source is just becoming basically a requirement because of customer expectations in community.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you look at the clock cycle of how often big new software companies get built, it's not every day. Enterprise architectures only change so often, right? Like if you were to try to sell a middleware offer in 2008, I don't think you could have raised money. You would have had a really hard time because none of the design patterns were changing. I think what's happening now is that cloud is disrupting a lot of people's approach to software infrastructure, to how they build applications. And so this crop of open source companies is getting a chance to be the leader of a new thought versus purely being a commodization play.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd love to get back to this question of why now? Like, I'm just so curious, which is like, is it like, have you figured out something that nobody else has or is it that the enterprise is now real that they need to pay for this software? Or is it something else going on? Why are we starting to see the elastic searches? Why are we starting to see the mesospheres? Why are we starting to see these companies be successful?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I so many open source companies have died because they transact around the edges with like director level or technician level for support. And they never got to the CTO, the CIO, and true strategic account control like the big players had.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. So, this is a nuanced and new way of looking at that discussion. So, how much does your ACV have to be to support a sales force? I'd say it has to be at least 150, 200K. You would say that it actually should be higher than that because the goal isn't just the margins on a direct sales force. The goal is really strategic account control. And to get that, you need a deeper engagement. Yeah. Very interesting.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the critical thing that happens at that is not that you extract more money, it's actually that you can be a better advisor. Like you can actually put talent on the ground. And you'll find that these large enterprises during times of big change really value that talent on the ground.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think what's happened is that open source has become how large enterprises want to bet on big new trends. And then that opens the capability for the first time of open source companies. I'll use the word being high-end, meaning that IBM and Oracle are parking a bunch of good platform architects, as we call them, technical architects at the account that explain the new things to that account. If you want to get a $10 million relationship going, you've got to become that extended part of their team. Actually, I jumped in for our original Twitter discussion around the $100,000 a year deal. And I was like, hey, actually, I think $100 is too low. Like I would try to get to $400 to $1.5.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've spent quite a while doing enterprise sales, and I've got this view, and this caused this conversation that you and I had on Twitter, which I had claimed that in direct enterprise software sales, it seems to be this value of death between like, say, 30K and 150k. If you're 20K or below, you know, you can call somebody up and they can pay for it. And let's say if you're 200K and above, then you have hopes of supporting a direct sales force and still have good margins. In between that, you've got this value of death where you can't really support a direct sale because you can't pay the people. But like, you know, like if you're trying to do something new and innovative, you don't have account control and becomes very transactional. So do the dynamics of that change with open source sales?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some of the origin of this discussion was we were speaking on Twitter around this $100 or $200,000 contract value and even some sub that as sort of a value of death. I think if you go back to why the big software companies. So, I don't really like the hundred thousand dollar year relationship because it's very transactional. When you're part of a big change like microservices in the enterprise, they're going to want advisory. They're going to want you there. They're going to want a team of two to three people that just live there. A key thing is that when the $10 million transaction comes, they're as much voting with they want you to be part of their extended team and part of their strategy, part of a relationship with you. Yeah. Because you have an expertise that's been hard won that they do not have.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So here's probably the most basic question in this space. And if you have an open source project, it's probably available online. So if you're walking to somebody and you're about to sign a $10 million ELA for license, what's stopping them from just downloading and running it themselves?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The key is keeping a unique offer in the market, right? You don't want to be yet another distro of a certain famous technology that provides support. I think you want to have a fully packaged differentiated approach.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is why having a unique market position is important regardless of your open source or not, because I've seen cases where very large orders were suddenly stopped because another large company just quoted something that sounded similar for the same amount. Now, that can happen open or closed, but if you're in an open source dog pile, as I mentioned, more to caution, it's especially rampant. That can actually drive your entire upside of ever being a half billion dollar a year software company. Like your probabilities go down really hard.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think you can think about it the same way as closed source if your model is you've sold someone on a big new trend, you've helped train their organization to get there, and then you're working on a fresh demand for cast of the transaction together. If you're coming in and upselling support only and they're already installed and all you're upselling is this support model, that's going to be a lot more difficult because they already have it running, they already have it working at their scale and all they want is essentially professional services by phone.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know This is such an important point. I think it's actually worth restating, which is if you've originated a project and you're bringing that to market, you should retain the ability to be the sole supplier, if only to set pricing and brand awareness in the market. Companies live or die by this type of thing. Another thing I like to hear, this is true for you, having spent a lot of time dealing with procurement more than anything else dictates the life of enterprise sales. Before going into procurement, I always expect procurement to need their pound of flesh. Like this is how these guys are comped often. It's like, okay, you know, whatever the discounting is. And so we would, you know, we'd expect that going to procurement, you'd go a bit of a kabuki show, and then you end up with some pricing. And that pricing is actually for the vertical has been set in the market somehow. So it's pretty well understood for forecasting by the business, pretty understood by the customer, and it's kind of motions you have to go through. Do you find an open source that that discussion is different because you are”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, a dog pile is a little bit like everyone's doing X project. We've got a distro of X project. Think about that dynamics when you go into procurement then and 20 people show up with an offer for X project. Like no matter how much your champion loves you, the procurement officer is going to have 10 comparables to compare you against. If you look at MongoDB, for instance, one of the things that protected them was that they are the only supplier of Mongo. So while they might not have had the high-end strategy right when they started, they at least were the sole supplier. So they could still somewhat dictate prices. If you look at OpenStack distros, I don't know that anyone made it out of light of that gunfight.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Champion wants you to win. Like, if you're in procurement, they want you to win and they want to work with you. And this is why one of my other rules about open source monetization is try to avoid dog piles.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think that says that generally in an enterprise, when you get to procurement, somebody wants you to win. You're actually then in a political process to get through the last mile. Like they're kind of like the guardians there.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I do think there is some room to differentiate there. And when you go to monetize, you're going to need some small check boxes. I've learned a lot growing this about the importance of packaging for procurement. And one of the things I've observed is that procurement is exceptionally good at pricing a certain kind of thing, which is labor per hour. So I've seen very large software contract orders and procurement will actually pick on the labor per hour because that has a nearer comparable. And so when you start to think about procurements looking to compare things to exact replicas to price it, having a little bit of closed source UI or things that are maybe even immaterial to the product but are still there to say, oh, well, this is different is somewhat important.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the decisions we made is we made our UIs closed source. So everything about the infrastructure of the platform is completely open source. And we chose to make the UI in that last mile of experience built off the APIs, closed source. Okay.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are there any challenges though in sort of bringing a polish to open source work? Because when I think of traditional software companies, they have baked in design for user, like really client-facing versus developer facing. So how do you sort of navigate that part of that is building a real business?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big success stories sometimes have contrarian bets in them. And I would distill our two contrarian bets to we did not go for the commoditization play. We went for the sea change and app design play. And then we also tried as best to deliver a service-like experience even with software.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's exactly right. We hear this all the time, which is more and more the customer wants to consume things as a service. And this is often conflated with whether it's deployed off-prem or on-prem. To me, this is a total conflation, right? Like whether or not it's a service does not mean it's necessarily deployed off-prem, right? These are two things. So one decision, off-prem or on-prem, like that's actually a decision often like bound by regulatory compliance and security, et cetera, there's an entirely different decision is, is my consumption model as a service? That could be I pay for it as a service, but it also could be somebody else basically manages it, does the update, manages the lifecycle, I don't deal with the tar balls. That's very much in line with what we're seeing across the industry too. And what makes this discussion particularly relevant to open source is that it seems that once you're talking about something as a service, questions around open source kind of diminish because they're not actually dealing with the code itself. They're dealing with”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the basics are strategy and segments. If your strategy and segment looks wildly different than every other big software company that's existed before, that's probably a pause. And then the second thing is I think that cloud has started to affect open source. And we've taken a model of continuous delivery of our software inclusive cloud API. We don't do what I call shipping you the tarball and the support contract and say good luck. We actually automate the continuous deployment and update of our software. And so we have an additional point of leverage other than You just blame us and call us. And that's a different vector. That's almost like a cloud vector in terms of value add of software packaging”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I mean, you are trapped to a fraction of the market you're chasing after by definition, right? Like if it wasn't a fraction of it, you wouldn't be commoditizing it. And it's very unlikely you're going to get 100%. And so you're necessarily have a ceiling over you. It sounds to me that your recommendation does a lot like closed source software sale. However, is it more than just kind of software sales or is it just that like the industry is ready for open source now when it wasn't before? Like what has happened in the last two years to make this viable or is there more to the puzzle that you haven't talked about?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does because it limits your business model. It doesn't let you invest. We have a hundred million dollar RD budget. When you're chasing a new big strategic trend and you're getting the kind of checks that we are and the trust we are. You can build a big RD team You're chasing commoditization.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's actually from my conversations, it's almost somewhat of a contrarian view because traditionally you're like open source projects chase after basically the sales dollars that have matured on market like MySQL, you know, like Android, like Linux, like JBoss, every one of these you can point to a closed source incumbent that they were chasing after. So it's nice to hear that you believe that open source is not somehow relegated to this commoditization because I agree with you. That basically limits the upside you're going to get.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learned over the years that open source is now both a necessary part of almost any major software company strategy because it's a buying criteria that enterprises have for major new initiatives. that I think the open source got a little bit of a false start by only being low cost commoditization as a business model.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look at history a little bit. I think Zen and OpenStack both felt like they could go commoditize VMware, right? They both said we're going to go commoditize VMware. The last time I checked, Oracle and IBM did not get to be the size they are by having commoditized a previous generation of suppliers. So if you just look at the record, and this is what I call like the false horizon of open source strategy, you might be tempted that your only play is to be a commoditization play. But history tells us that the largest software companies in the world that get into the hundreds of billion evaluation, that's not what they did. They caught megatrends.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source