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

“There's been a long time this thought that open source was primarily a commoditizing force. There's an existing market, say Unix. It's an existing market when the existing buyer, then you create an open source version, which is differentiated by being open and open source, and then you go commoditizing that existing market. And you're saying something quite a bit different. You're actually saying that you can enter a new market using a shift and sell into that. So I guess two questions. One, do you believe in the commoditization? Is that still a business plan? And then the second one is, is there any difference in open source to identifying these shifts, or is it just like if you're doing a closed source product?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The next thing you have to get right is you've got to get a major trend that affects enterprise buyers. So if you go back to enterprises being the source of the money, Oracle didn't magically just exist one day. They caught the relational database market at the right time and they built a franchise. And that relational database market really changed how enterprises were building applications, what they could do on applications. And in the same way, we've tried to catch the microservices trend as the major enterprise change that's happening. That's the kind of change then you need on your commercial strategy to generate CIO interest and enterprise purchases. It can't just be a tool that someone's potentially using lower levels.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's tempting when you put so much heart and soul effort into building that proof of validation around a community first to say, oh, well, then I'll go upsell them. And I remember meeting MongoDB when they were early and their rise and they were selling a $4,000 support contract to thousands of users with a lot of expense. And when we built PCF, I was like, I don't think that's the right way for us to go be big. Just because you're open source doesn't mean you only sell to your open source users.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, how do you sort of straddle this? Because theoretically, you should be able to do both, but isn't sort of the mantra, I should say, the Indian way, of open source, that you have to take care of your open source community and then also figure out how to become a business? Like, how does a company that's trying to become a real big company straddle that?”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I cater to is like, I think this is the number one thing that I see open source companies maybe get wrong is those are the people that show up and talk to you. Those are the people that you're interacting with. When you're creating an open source community, you have to first get these unpaid users excited. But ultimately, IBM and Oracle are not out there mining, they're mailing lists of end users to go do deals.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Developers that fork it on GitHub, start on GitHub. And the misassociation as a first thing between the people that use it and then the people they need to cater to selling to is kind of what you might call the first false horizon of open source monetization.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think it's fair to describe kind of my maturation and my thinking about this through failures too. I worked on Open Solaris at Sun. And then for a while at VMware, we were looking at how do you monetize spring source in and of itself. SpringSource is like the most popular Java programming framework in the world by VMware, pretty famous money over $400 million as an open source project. I had worked on that, both of those projects and had gotten my bumps and bruises along the way. And so I had some very particular opinions coming into doing the third round of PCF Pivotal Cloud Foundry. I think there's kind of two dimensions. One is the basics, which is if you look at IBM and Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, et cetera, what they get right at is a very basic thing is they understand how to cater to enterprises.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does that mean in Oh, so it's not professional services because that's the stuff that has like, that's the thing we talk about all the time in terms of building businesses is that you don't necessarily want to rely on professional services because it doesn't give you a lot of margin on your business.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the paradoxes in this entire space is there's been a ton of money that's been invested in open source, but almost no examples of successful companies built around it. Silicon Valley had a spidey sense that there was an opportunity there. Like nobody pulled it off. Now there's a number of examples of open source companies doing very well. James was one of the few people on the planet that's cracked that where they figured out how to monetize and build a big business out of open source. And just to give a sense of how real this is, Pivotal Count Foundry went from zero to $270 million in license, not support. What does that mean in license? In license, in software sales.”
2017-04-11 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source