Bridging the Knowledge Gap on Community Data with Daniel Izquierdo

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Oct 25, 2023

Daniel Izquierdo, Co-Founder and CEO at Bitergia, shares his fascinating journey from academia to the open-source realm. He discusses the unique challenges and metrics involved in measuring open-source communities, emphasizing the importance of data contextualization. Daniel highlights Bitergia's cooperative model, focusing on sustainable growth for employees and customers. He outlines strategies for community engagement through data, the balance of open-source principles with business, and how they navigated different business models before finding their niche.

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ANECDOTE

Origin of Bitergia

Daniel Izquierdo and five others co-founded Bitergia in 2012 after their academic research group shrunk during an economic crisis.
The team transitioned from academia to business, aiming to apply their open source research practically.

ANECDOTE

Early Customer and Growth

Bitergia's first customer was the OpenStack Foundation, helped by a well-connected professor's networks.
Early projects built trust and the company grew slowly by engaging open source communities.

INSIGHT

Bitergia's Revenue Model

Bitergia earns revenue mainly through their open source project Grimoire Lab and consultancy.
They help clients interpret community data and answer strategic business questions with their expertise.

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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, including why they haven’t focused on growing fast so much as they have focused on growing in a way that supports their employees and customers. He also shares insights into how to measure an open-source community, and the knowledge gaps that he sees in people who can’t contextualize the data they’re getting on their community. Daniel also walks us through the other open-source business models Bitergia tried before discovering what worked for them.

Highlights:

I introduce Daniel, who is the Co-Founder and CEO at Bitergia, as he joins me at the Open Source Summit in Bilbao (00:24)
Daniel describes the work that he does at Bitergia (00:41)
The story of why Daniel helped to co-found Bitergia during the finalizing of his PhD (01:38)
How Daniel and his co-founders got by as they transitioned from academia to founding an open-source company, and what the first year of running Bitergia was like (03:28)
Daniel explains how Bitergia makes money as an open-source company (06:04)
The main types of customers that Bitergia works with (07:50)
The metrics that Daniel feels are critical when measuring an open-source community (08:50)
Daniel describes the knowledge gap he observes in clients who can’t contextualize the data they get on their community (11:16)
The story of how Bitergia tried other open-source business models before finding what worked for them (13:41)
Why Daniel feels it is a disadvantage to have his company based in Spain (16:07)
Daniel shares his growth philosophy for Bitergia (18:47)
The challenges facing Daniel and his team at the moment (20:21)
Daniel’s advice to aspiring open-source founders (21:53)
The most interesting mistake Daniel feels he made in building Bitergia (23:57)
Daniel shares what he feels is the main difference between starting a company with and without an open-source component (25:33)

Links:

Daniel

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dicortazar/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/dizquierdo
Company: https://bitergia.com/