No Funding, No Managers, No Problem - Olivier Gaudin on Scaling SonarSource Intuitively

Olivier Gaudin is the co-founder of SonarSource, the developer tooling company that quietly became a global force, without raising a cent in its first years. Built out of frustration with bad code quality, SonarSource started as a side project among three friends and grew into a 800-person company powering millions of developers worldwide.

In this episode we talk about:
•⁠ ⁠Why staying “use case focused” beats being “customer obsessed”
•⁠ ⁠How to scale a culture without adding managers—until you absolutely have to
•⁠ ⁠Why open source was the smartest product decision they ever made
•⁠ ⁠How SonarSource expanded into the U.S. by trusting intuition over playbooks

A conversation about intentional scaling, deep product convictions, and the silent compounding of community trust.
For more from Olivier - including early decisions that unlocked adoption and how SonarSource stayed aligned across continents - subscribe to our newsletter at followthegradient.io.