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**Nadia Eghbal:** \[36:10\] Totally. |
**David Cramer:** npm is a business built around a workflow which has been pioneered in an open source community, so we're not really selling our open source thing; what we're selling is some tools to make it easier to use this open source workflow, which is a little bit of like a subtle thing to wrap your head around.... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Yeah, even the term "open source business" is not really actually a term; it's like a business that might have a component to it that's open source, but how that is monetized, or whether it's even relevant to the business itself seems to vary a lot. A lot of companies now that are saying they're an op... |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, I agree with this whole ship that makes it more accessible - cloud services fundamentally - but I think the thing that really would make you think that npm or Sentry are these hot new open source ideas is because of the market that we're going after. Both of us focus on the developer market. ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** I think that's a really great point. It kind of coincides with a lot of other things around more like bottom-up everything, instead of top-down. |
**David Cramer:** Also, you mentioned you're not sure if "open source business" is even a real term; that does not stop anybody from using it. \[laughter\] It absolutely is a thing that people say, and even use it in kind of ludicrous ways. Like, how can you open source-ify your business, which is a.... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Oh, god... |
**David Cramer:** It's a real sentence I've heard a real human being utter. It's challenging, right? I mean, not every business makes sense, and the role that open source plays in some businesses might not make sense. There's a lot to be said for proprietary software; there's a lot of proprietary software in the world,... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Alright, we're gonna take a short break and when we get back we'll dig a little bit more into the open source side of things. |
**Break:** \[39:30\] |
**Nadia Eghbal:** And we're back with Isaac Schlueter from npm and David Cramer from Sentry. Let's get into the open source side of things with both of your businesses. For the projects that you're stewarding as a company, do you think of your projects as something that the community builds and you're sort of another a... |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Sentry has never been kind of a community-built project, and we're totally okay with that. Even today, which is probably not great for a CEO, if you look at the contribution graph, it's like I wrote nearly everything, and I think this is valuable because it allowed myself to drive the direction of ... |
That's been very beneficial to us. That said, on the other side what we have done is we really pushed a lot of "Here's how it's extensible, here's how you can integrate or send data" and things like that. And what we saw early on is a lot of people were interested in that side. It's much more accessible than a complex ... |
Somebody else was like, "Hey, it'd be cool to be able to use GitHub to create issues from Sentry", so they went and they built the GitHub integration. That's really where a lot of our power has come over the years. For us especially, that's been a very compelling story because while we might be very good at what we do,... |
But then we also do now and then get bug fixes from companies. Back in the day, when this big gaming company started using Sentry, they started contributing these really compelling performance patches that were very specific to their needs but were very interesting. Fast-forward today and we still have that same idea. ... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'm interested to hear Isaac's take on it, since npm is literally an ecosystem. |
**David Cramer:** \[43:49\] That's always been a little bit interesting with the npm client, because it was... There are a couple of different things to talk about when we talk about our participation in open source. There's the npm project itself, the CLI project. There's the massive number of open source modules whic... |
The npm client is open source - it always has been - but for a very long time it was essentially a single-author open source project, which is a very simple governance style. The governance was, "I make all the changes, and if you have an idea, I'll either take your pull request or not", but it was essentially just run... |
That's since changed significantly. We have a team of people working on it - there are three individuals working on it today, and quite a bit of their actual day-to-day work is spent on communication with our open source users. We take issues on the open source GitHub issues list, they have a semi-regular call that the... |
That transparency has caused an increase in the number of pull requests and the quality of bug reports that they get, but they've also been working on making the codebase itself a little bit more accessible, which is a big and somewhat overlooked challenge in any open source project. I think the social structures aroun... |
I've seen this in literally almost every single open source project I've ever been connected to - npm, Node, PHP Core project, the Linux Kernel... Although the Linux Kernel probably does a better job of this particular aspect than most projects. It's still pretty daunting, though. You can approach it in a couple of dif... |
But in terms of our role in the community, that's been a little bit more challenging. I feel a personal weight of responsibility to make sure that this community is a functional community and to make sure that our users are able to use the service and not be in too great a conflict with one another, and able to actuall... |
In the very early days actually, Michael wrote the first version of the registry, which had no authorization or authentication whatsoever. It was like, "You wanna publish a thing? Alright. You probably know what you're doing if you know what this thing is." That didn't last very long. That had people taking advantage o... |
\[48:08\] Also, as a community, you go from the state where literally everybody has met everybody else. Where everybody was one or two degrees of separation from each other, to the point now where there's more npm users than in some major American cities. This requires a different sort of policy, it requires different ... |
While on the one hand it's a little bit troubling to have a for-profit company - or any entity, really - in this position of authority and control, at the same time anarchy doesn't really serve anybody. Anarchy just means that the loudest voices have the most control, and that's really not any better. I feel like there... |
At the same time, we try very hard not to abuse our position and to be as transparent as possible. Some of the things we do there - we have a support team, which if you email support@npmjs.com you will talk to them. They're not there to do your Node homework, they are there to resolve issues that you might have with th... |
We also have a lot of time and effort and money and energy spent on keeping the service running, which is sort of the core thing that keeps the community healthy. We try very hard not to abuse our position as much as possible. We are trying to run a business, but the actual purpose of this business is to keep the commu... |
If two people want the same thing or are fighting over something, the one that you don't agree with is gonna be very upset at you about it, and there's sometimes just no way around that. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Do you think it's possible for a company to actually be in a community or part of a community, or is it always sort of this outside patron that is kind of facilitating the rest of the community? Because this is in some ways like talking about protecting the npm community... For either of you, do your ... |
**David Cramer:** I think that all too often we talk about a company as if it's a single entity, and despite what politicians and Super PAC say, companies aren't people; corporations aren't people, they're legal entities with interest, but they're just sort of a bunch of people working together for some kind of common ... |
\[51:44\] The brand of npm I think is very strong. Like I said, I have a large personal interest in continuing that and making sure that we're a force of good. I think mostly that can very easily become a virtuous cycle or a vicious cycle, depending on how you spin it. Most of the people who work for me have, as far as... |
It's kind of weird... I think frequently where you tend to get into trouble is when you try to have a company pretend that they're part of the community when it's pretty clear that they're not. If they're saying, "Look, we're using Node, we're a part of this community, so therefore you should like us, because you like ... |
I think it's actually kind of rare that there are companies like npm or Automattic or Sentry where not only are they just kind of involved with this community in this sort of abstract sense, their products and services literally depend upon it and their success depends upon the success of the community, and the people ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** David, how about Sentry? Are they Sentry employees or are they themselves? |
**Isaac Schlueter:** It's very different for Sentry, just because we're not a community. npm has tons and tons of users and they interact heavily with their own code, their own projects through npm, whereas Sentry it's like you're using our product, the product that we built. I very much believe that everyone at Sentry... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** Does this affect how you think about recruiting? Are you looking for people that are...? I mean obviously, probably people that have already been involved with Sentry, or care about it, or think about, but do you that sort of like strengthens that unified voice if you're hiring someone who is already ... |
**Isaac Schlueter:** It absolutely does. I think we're a slightly non-traditional company, at least in the VC-funded startup world, in that the entire team is engineers right now. Most of the team has contributed to Sentry or runs Sentry, or at least used Sentry before joining the company. So it helps that a lot of peo... |
It's been very valuable for us to have that. I would say that everybody has a different idea for the small branches of how Sentry should work, but everybody has the mindset that this is super valuable what we're doing, we agree with the direction we're going, how can we contribute to make that a reality? I think there'... |
So far, what we've done has worked well for just building a singular project. |
**Nadia Eghbal:** How do your investors think about the whole -- having to work with communities or just outside users that might have a say in your projects, that aren't actually a part of the company. |
**Isaac Schlueter:** \[56:00\] Speaking for Sentry, I'm not sure the investors really consider it much. I think a lot of the trust... Like, when we talk to them, the mentality is like, "You've done very well to get where you are. Whatever you're doing must be right. How do we push it to the next level?" So I think ther... |
**David Cramer:** I think as far as the community interactions and advice from our investors, they... I don't know, I don't wanna say they don't care; I mean, certainly they're very excited that we have so many users. Both of our investors, if you look at their portfolio companies, what they tend to go for are companie... |
That being said, as far as managing the community, they're not really experts in that. I think they are betting on us being experts in that. Obviously, we've built this huge community, we have this huge type of funnel; they're mostly just concerned with how well we can turn those eyeballs into dollars, so to speak, to ... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** It's funny hearing both of your... I think it's important hearing both of your experiences, because they are very different types of projects and they way that you'll run them and monetize them and manage the community is naturally very different. I think it just speaks again to the fact that not ever... |
Do you think that building businesses like these is different from building other types of startups at all? Is there anything about having the open source side of things that makes it different from any other startup wisdom that you might hear? |
**David Cramer:** I think for npm it kind of makes it a lot easier. One of the biggest hurdles is getting people to use your thing, and I guess it's a little bit suspicious to say that it's easier... I mean, we've traded one set of problems for another, but there are certainly some very big problems which are fatal pro... |
**Isaac Schlueter:** For Sentry it's fairly similar... There's things that we could not have achieved without the open source aspects, at least not at our scale. For us, cross-platform is a true fundamental strength and requirement of our product, and there's no way we could have done most of this without the community... |
So there's still a lot of challenges around conveying what open source means to your users and how that affects your business and things like that. But I think it's just another channel that you treat differently at the end of the day and each business does that differently. Open source is just one factor that influenc... |
**Nadia Eghbal:** That's a great idea to end on. Thanks for talking with us, David and Isaac. We really enjoyed this. |
**Isaac Schlueter:** Yeah, thanks for having us. |
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