The CFO's View of Open Source Companies with Eileen Doody and Karen Walker

This week on The Business of Open Source I had a slightly different conversation: I spoke with the CFOs of two open source companies, Sysdig and Percona, to better understand what is different (and what is not) about financial management in open source companies. Karen Walker is the CFO at Sysdig, and Eileen Doody is the CFO at Percona. They both joined me to talk about the CFO role in general and the CFO role in particular at an open source company. 

Why did I do this episode? Many founders I’ve spoken with are a bit unclear on the role of a CFO — whereas I’ve never spoken with a founder who had trouble understanding what their CTO does. Here’s some takeaways from our conversation: 

• Part of the CFO’s role is about thinking about open source strategically, in terms of how the open source project is going to fit into the company’s overall strategy.
• Because open source is so ingrained in the company, it doesn’t fit into a single budget line item; it’s impossible to break out and say ‘we spend $X on open source’ because it’s so integrated into everything the company does
• How do you measure your ROI on investment in open source? 
• At Sysdig, two out of three prospects come to the company because of Falco, their open source project. 
• We also talked about the ecosystem effects of having a huge footprint with your open source project; it’s hard to measure the positive influence of having massive brand awareness, but both CFOs are convinced that it is very important to the company. 
• Eileen says that many CIOs now have mandates to look for open source solutions when possible, which was not the case a decade ago. That’s changed the dynamic for a company like Percona that’s based around open source. 

Another reason I did this episode is because while I usually have founders on the podcast, there are some really important perspectives from other leadership team members. Part of the the role of a CEO is to understand all the other C-level leadership position’s roles and responsibilities, and in my experience the CFO is one of the less well understood roles. In fact, we wrapped up the conversation by talking about how a CFO can be a real strategic partner that’s forward-thinking rather than just the bean-counter that some people expect a CFO to be. 

A couple things to mention. First of all, if you want to learn more about my consulting work with open source companies, you can do so here. Second, if you want to chance to connect with other founders of open source companies, consider joining Open Source Founders Summit this May 19th and 20th in Paris.