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• Isaac's experience working with Sentry at Joyent, including its infrastructure service and use by small/large businesses. |
• David's departure from Joyent and npm, including tension around recruiting tool status and concerns about Joyent's ability to support npm. |
• Alternative options for npm (foundation, VC funding) and their perceived drawbacks. |
• The Node Foundation and its relation to Joyent, Sentry, and other companies. |
• JavaScript community's openness to business models |
• npm and Sentry's revenue streams (SaaS, enterprise products) |
• Importance of transparency when working with open-source communities |
• Comparison of business models between Sentry, npm, and other companies like GitHub, WordPress, and GitLab |
• Evolution of pricing models in open-source communities |
• Copying and pasting someone else's business model as a starting point |
• Importance of getting to market quickly with an imperfect pricing model |
• Value of being bootstrapped or having early sponsorship for cash flow positivity |
• Shift in open source business models from old school enterprise companies to SaaS |
• Focus on communities and services rather than just open source software |
• Leveraging internet-connected tools and services to build open source businesses |
• The term "open source business" is not well-defined and its meaning varies among companies. |
• Companies use open source as a way to attract developers, build platforms, and recruit talent. |
• The market for open source businesses has shifted from top-down decision-making to bottom-up, where developers drive decisions. |
• Open sourcing projects can be beneficial for companies like npm and Sentry, which focus on the developer market. |
• Proprietary software still plays a significant role in many industries, but open source is becoming increasingly prevalent. |
• Companies are using open source as a way to build businesses around existing products, rather than building proprietary solutions. |
• Isaac Schlueter's approach to open sourcing Sentry has been successful due to his ability to drive the project's direction. |
• npm and Sentry have different approaches to open source, with npm focusing on community contributions and Sentry focusing on external contributors for specific issues. |
• The challenges of maintaining a community-driven codebase and balancing governance approaches as it grows |
• The importance of having a clear governance structure and rules for decision-making to prevent anarchy and maintain community health |
• The role of npm in the community, including its responsibilities and efforts to ensure transparency and avoid abuse of power |
• The relationship between companies and communities, with discussions on whether companies can truly be part of a community or if they are always external patrons |
• Examples from npm and Sentry on how their employees interact within projects, representing themselves as individuals rather than solely as the company |
• The value of hiring team members who are already familiar with and invested in the project, and the benefits of this approach for building a unified voice and product direction. |
• Investors trust open source companies to know what they're doing |
• Open source plays to investors' strengths in developer-lead enterprise products with network effects |
• Community management is not the primary concern of investors, but rather monetization of user engagement |
• Building businesses around open source projects requires adapting to unique challenges and opportunities |
• Conveying the value of open source to users can be a challenge for companies like Sentry |
**Nadia Eghbal:** On today's show, Mikeal and I talk with David Cramer, CEO of Sentry, and Isaac Schlueter, CEO of npm. Sentry is a developer tool for detecting application errors, and npm is the default package manager NodeJS. Both started as open source projects, which David and Isaac have built into businesses. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Our focus on today's episode with David and Isaac was around building businesses in open source. We talked about why they decided to turn their side projects into full-time work, and how they experimented with finding steady sources of revenue. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** We also talked about raising venture capital, working with investors and with community and different company approaches to developing open source projects. |
So let's get into the history of Sentry and npm before we get started. Both of you have pretty interesting backgrounds on how you built these businesses over a number of years. Sentry, David, I know that it started as a project that you built for work when you were at Disqus, and then it seemed like it was this side pr... |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, absolutely. So Sentry is pretty old, it's about eight years I think, at this point. When I joined Disqus, they were using what eventually turned into Sentry. Terrible piece of code, so my first month there we kind of revamped it, brought it up to speed with the quality that we needed, and the... |
I guess one thing that always fascinated me with open source was you can kind of share results with the world, they provide feedback; the communities are very interactive, and that traction kind of lead to us continuing to build it. That mean things like adding more support for other languages, for other platforms. Hon... |
Then fast-forward a few years, we had built a little SaaS service on top of it, and it was making a little bit of money. The running joke when I kicked it off was, "It might cover beers." So not a lot of ambition there. And here we are, about four and a half years since that day - we decided to go full-time last year, ... |
One of the forcing factors for us was just in the last few years there's been a huge amount of new competition in our space, and anybody who knows me knows that I'm not one to kind of let somebody step in and take over whatever I've been doing. So we really risked Sentry becoming obsolete if we didn't double down on it... |
That also is kind of a lot of the reason we went down to venture capital, just to continue to compete and do well. But yeah, happy to dive into more specifics if need be. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** \[03:51\] I'm wondering why you were so reluctant to just go full-time in it from the start when tons of people were using, big companies were using it, and people were paying for it. Why did it take so long to actually go full-time in it? |
**Isaac Schlueter:** I'm fairly risk-averse, so I did not go full-time on Sentry until we were able to match salaries, and I was working at Dropbox before (Dropbox pays fairly well), so there was a little bit of that. It was also just, we didn't really wanna go down the venture capital route. Honestly, it just wasn't i... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** At any time did the project kind of suffer from not having that kind of support? |
**Isaac Schlueter:** I would say absolutely over the course of the years where it was purely a side project. I was building a lot of things at Dropbox during the prime of Sentry's life, and juggling those two full-time gigs was really hard. So what it meant is the iteration speed at Sentry was greatly reduced. That's k... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Isaac, does this sound at all familiar to you, or is your story a bit different? |
**David Cramer:** It's not that different. I created npm in 2009; it was a big part of the Node community for a long time. Obviously, it's the thing that you do when you're doing Node. And by the end of 2013 it had been my side project for a little around four years, and it was still running on donated infrastructure a... |
It just kind of grew to the point where that approach no longer worked. We had about two months of... I joked that we had one nine of uptime and it wasn't in the first digit, like it wasn't in the tens place. Stuff would fall over and I would start getting messages and emails and tweets and angry GitHub notifications, ... |
I had some help from some very noble souls who basically said, "Look, you can either start paying for this thing or take it somewhere else, because we can't do this for free anymore." |
Around the same time, I was getting a lot of feedback about it from people working at pretty big companies, some of them saying, "Look, we really wanna use this thing, but a) we can't trust it because it falls over all the time, and b) it's all open source; we need a thing to host our private code and all the alternati... |
That seemed like a happy coincidence of events there, and we raised some money from True Ventures and a couple of angels and started the company at the beginning of 2014. It really was a shift from... You know, it wasn't a business with paying customers that I was really only working on part-time, it was something that... |
So it seemed like the obvious choice was to start a company around it so that I could justify hiring some full-time, dedicated ops people and actually build some products to address the needs of companies that were using it to manage their JavaScript modules. |
\[07:57\] Since then, we've grown to about 25 people now, we have two products and they're growing pretty well. It's a ton of work running a company, but at least it's actually full-time, front and center work. That's been sort of nice, to be able to focus on it. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think we touched a little bit on your projects being open source, and that it was important to you. Do you think at all about how that might affect running a business while having an open source product and whether it might be a little more difficult? |
**David Cramer:** I think for npm it's always been pretty clear to me that the client itself, the CLI program is not what people are ever gonna pay for. They're willing to pay for the service that enables the workflows that they're using, but there's no benefit really to not having the npm client be open source, or eve... |
If it was easy, I would have been able to do it without starting a company, and I think that that's sort of the thing that puts us in that sort of strategic position in order to run a successful business. I have really no worries whatsoever about it being open source, and honestly the investors that I've talked to, som... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** How about you, David? |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, it's kind of the same on our side. Sentry is an infrastructure service. A lot of people run it themselves. I would say they're not overly thrilled with that idea, but due to the nature of data that Sentry works with, it's kind of a requirement that we work on premise. But we get enough small ... |
I think that was especially great early on in the project's lifecycle, and today in terms of marketing and other aspects it's very valuable for us to continue to grow. Honestly for us, we think of it a lot like a traditional freemium model. We don't offer free accounts on our SaaS service, but if you wanna use Sentry f... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** So Sentry and npm both started while you were at companies, or developed a lot while you were at Disqus and Isaac was at Joyent. Can you tell us a little bit about the relationship between the company and the project? Did having those projects help the company that you were at, or were they involved a... |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, so at Disqus, like I mentioned, the first month I was there we kind of kicked off Sentry. We kind of had the "happy accident" that it was pre-licensed, because we just built on additional code, and the founders of Disqus were totally on board with open source. |
So I was able to get some help building out Sentry for our needs at Disqus, but I made a pretty clear point to never just build random features on top of Sentry during my time at Disqus. I would work on it in the evenings and things like that, but we would also build out features that we needed to make it better. I thi... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** And there was no tension when you left... Because if it was a recruiting tool, you have to imagine that that recruiting tool kind of goes away if now there's a Sentry company and they're not the Sentry company, right? |
**Isaac Schlueter:** \[11:50\] Yeah, I mean that's how the world works. When employees go away, you can no longer use them as recruiting tools. There was no tension that I'm aware of when I left. I still keep in touch very closely with at least one of the founders, and on good terms with the other. |
**David Cramer:** As far as npm and Joyent, I think I got the job at Joyent in part because I had written npm. |
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