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Waters: Multibillion-dollar software companies succeed by catching megatrends, not commoditizing incumbents

James Waters · a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software) · Jan 2, 2019 · at 5:33

James Waters, VP at Pivotal, argues against the traditional view that open source companies should primarily focus on commoditizing existing enterprise software markets.

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“History tells us that the largest software companies in the world that get into the hundreds of billion in valuation, that's not what they did. They caught mega trends.”

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Waters: Pivotal kept its user interfaces closed source while open-sourcing infrastructure
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