“SpringSource is like the most popular Java programming framework in the world, bought by VMware for pretty famous money, over four hundred million dollars as an open source project.”
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More from James Waters
Insight
Waters: Multibillion-dollar software companies succeed by catching megatrends, not commoditizing incumbents
“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.”
James WatersJan 2, 2019▶ 5:33a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)
Disclosure
Waters: Pivotal kept its user interfaces closed source while open-sourcing infrastructure
“One of the decisions we made is we made our UIs closed source. So everything about the infrastructure of the platform is completely open source. And we chose to make the UI and that last mile of experience built off the APIs. Closed source.”
James WatersJan 2, 2019▶ 9:48a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)
Insight
Waters: Proprietary UI components help open-source companies differentiate in enterprise procurement
“Procurement is exceptionally good at pricing a certain kind of thing, which is labor per hour. So I've seen very large software contract orders and procurement will actually pick on the labor per hour because that has a near comparable. And so when you start t…”
James WatersJan 2, 2019▶ 10:13a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)
Insight
Waters: Upselling support for active open source deployments is unsustainable
“If you're coming in and upselling support only, and they're already installed, And all you're upselling is the support model. That's going to be a lot more difficult because they already have it running. They already have it working at their scale. And all the…”
James WatersJan 2, 2019▶ 13:18a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)
Insight
Waters: Enterprise software startups should target $400k to $1.5M annual contract values
“I think a hundred is too low. Like I would try to get to. 400 to 1.5. And the critical thing that happens at that is not that you extract more money. It's actually that you can be a better advisor. Like you can actually put talent on the ground and you'll find…”
James WatersJan 2, 2019▶ 17:23a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)
Insight
Waters: Open source companies fail by selling support instead of targeting C-level buyers
“So many open source companies have died because they transact around the edges with like director level or technician level with, for support. And they never got to the CTO, the CIO and true strategic account control like the big players had.”
James WatersJan 2, 2019▶ 18:07a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)
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