The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Cloud Native, I talked to Tzury Bar Yochay, founder and CTO of Reblaze, about building a cloud native security company before twelve thousand people were going to KubeCon. Highlights:Why your security measures have to keep up with hackers’ sophistication.The moment when Tzury decided to go from being a contractor for the defense industry to founding a company.Why the default path for startups is failure. Why open source is key to securing your cloud environment.How selling a security product to developers has evolved over time. Why lazy developers are good developers. Why selling software to developers is different from selling software to other types of professionals. Why he thinks the most brilliant developers tend to gravitate towards open source. Why security based on obscurity is a terrible, perhaps even evil, strategy. Links:ReblazeTzury on LinkedIn@tzury on TwitterTzury on GitHubCuriefense

This week, I talked with Karthik Ranganathan about the challenges going from employee of a large company to startup frounder and why he founded Yugabyte because he wanted a database that both was transactional and still could be highly available.Highlights: Why the ability to scale is important for any cloud native application, including for a cloud native database.Why Yugabyte is still open source and why being open source is important to the company. Why enterprises wanted an open source database to house their mission-critical data. Why the company went from an open core model to open source / managed service model. Why end customers care about open source. Why early-stage, small companies have trouble establishing trust and how being open source helps build trust. Why building around open source helps nudge customers to ‘buy’ instead of built it themselves. Why finding the right position and the right message is a major challenge at the beginning of the company. Links: Karthik on LinkedInKarthik on Twitter YugabyteYugabyte Slack

This week, I talked to Natalie Ledbetter, Head of People and Platform at Boldstart Ventures. We talked about how startups can approach team and culture building, including:How to prioritize your hiresCommon mistakes founders make when building a teamWhy you should always avoid brilliant jerks, even if they are very brilliantHow to divide responsibilities between foundersAnticipating growth and setting your team up so that it can scale as easily as possibleThe difference in skills sets between 'startup people' and employees you would want to hire later onLinks: Natalie on LinkedInNatalie on TwitterBoldstart Ventures

In this episode of The Business of Cloud Native, we talk about the hard business goals behind words like "freedom" as well as what it's like to go from engineer to CEO. My guest, Sirish Raghuram, is the CEO and co-founder of Platform9.Links: https://platform9.com/https://www.linkedin.com/in/sirishraghuram/

In this episode of The Business of Cloud Native, Shawn Lankton talks about how Microsoft 365 and related applications fit into an organization's move to the cloud and why organizations need to pay attention to security for all their SaaS applications.  Links: https://www.coreview.comShawn on Twitter

Thomas Markey talks about how to remove some of the barriers to running an open source project with free hosting services.  Links: https://fosshost.orgThomas on LinkedInFOSSHOST on TwitterDiscord

Ranjan Parthasarathy talks about why separating compute and storage makes it easier to operate at hyper scale and why he decided to found Logiq.ai to make it easier for companies to do so. Links: LinkedInLogiq.ai

Have you thought about how your OSS license could impact your ability to grow your community and monetize your OSS in the future? Attorney McCoy Smith talks about what to be aware of at the beginning to avoid messy legal issues down the road. Links: McCoy on LinkedIn Lex Pan LawOpsequ.io

As an analyst at CCS insight, Bola Rotibi gets a birds-eye view of trends in how industries use software to advance their business goals. We had an incredible conversation about how companies use cloud native technology to meet business goals and how vendors in the cloud native space should pay more attention to the needs of specific industries. Links: https://www.ccsinsight.com/blog/author/bolarotibi/https://www.linkedin.com/in/bolarotibi/https://twitter.com/bolarotibi

SaaS companies that handle customers' sensitive data need to worry about how they manage data locality. In this podcast, Canopy CTO and founder talks about how their business would not be possible without the flexibility and ability to easily spin up resources in regions across the world that a cloud native architecture offers. Links: https://www.canopyco.iohttps://www.linkedin.com/in/oransears