Thread by @borrowed_ideas

1/ Notes from @chetanp and @jlowin episode at @InvestLikeBest

This episode is on open source software business model. Chetan is an investor at multiple such businesses e.g. $ESTC, $MDB etc, and Jeremiah is founder of one such businesses, @PrefectIO.

Investor, and Operator.

2/ So what exactly is open source software?

After some general overview of open source software business, Jeremiah expands on the topic using Prefect as an example.

3/ There has been a significant evolution from the late 2000s and early 2010s in case of open source software businesses because of the large cloud vendors such as AWS, Azure, and GCP.

4/ "...you have to actually know what you're selling and the answer is you're not selling the same source code that you put up and you're selling some extension of that"

"...it's not just barrier of entry is low for a software company, the barrier of entry is negative..."

5/ Defensibility of open source business as they scale? Not easy.

$MDB is one of the successful examples whose product "Atlas" has grown from zero to more than $200 mn run rate serving 16.8K customers in less than four years.

6/ "...public clouds ultimately sell two things. They ultimately sell compute and they sell storage, everything else is to facilitate that."

$AMZN $MSFT $GOOG

7/ Building an open source project is extremely hard. By its very nature, its success or failure can be visible to the community.

8/ How do you build a strong digital community?

Be nice.

9/ "One of the frustrating questions that we get is how do you compare to X?"

I loved this bit.

End/ Episode link: investorfieldguide.com/chetan-puttagu…

Transcript link: investorfieldguide.com/wp-content/upl…