The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 124 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Levine: Big data performance issues only occur in hybrid cloud setups
“And like Pratt said before, the performance issue is only an issue when we're going back and forth from the cloud to on prem.”
Levine: Open source as a service is the superior business model
“And my belief is that there's really a very, ah, beneficial model by having open source as a service, open and proprietary source as a service, Again, as a way to really drive economic value out of open source”
Levine: Facebook and Google Outpace Cisco in Networking Sophistication
“Yeah it's very fair to say. I think they, Facebook and Google, have absolutely pushed the needle on back-end data center infrastructure”
Levine: Cumulus Networks matches Cisco and Juniper performance on commodity hardware
“What they are doing is taking commodity hardware, putting a layer of Open source and closed source software on top of commodity servers and turning that into a new switch that is as fast as is, you know, as capable as some of the most proprietary systems that …”
Levine: Open-Source Renaissance Required Business Model Innovation
“And I would argue without business innovation, such as pay for support, open core, and of course, SAS, open source as a service, there really wouldn't be an open source renaissance.”
Levine: Open-Source Businesses Evolve Through Three Distinct Pillars
“Open source is built on three pillars. They are one, project community fit, two, product market fit, and three, value market fit. Each of these have measurable objectives, and these pillars sort of unfold over time.”
Levine: Open-Source Project Leaders Typically Become Startup CEOs
“What's most important is that open source has a project leader to drive the effort, and typically that project leader becomes the CEO of companies.”
Levine: a16z Strongly Prefers Funding Open-Source Project Leaders
“As investors, we are strongly biased towards funding project leaders since they own the project, they know the product roadmap and can lead the product roadmap and know the code base inside and out.”
Levine: Open-Source Product-Market Fit Is Measured by Organic Downloads
“The next is product market fit, and this is all about organic adoption as measured by the number of downloads.”
Levine: Value-Market Fit Centers on Enterprise Revenue, Not Users
“While product market fit often accrues to individual users, value market fit typically centers on departmental and enterprise buyers and is measured by revenue.”
Levine: Support and Services Open-Source Models Are Hard to Scale
“And I would say that the downside or potential area to be aware of is this model is very hard to scale and hard to scale operationally.”
Levine: Raw Downloads Fail to Reflect True Open-Source User Traction
“Measuring downloads turned out to be interesting, but not sufficient in terms of a metric that could credibly be used to indicate the user traction and what was happening.”
Levine: Open-Source Companies Need Separate Roadmaps for Free and Paid Features
“Typically, in an open source company, there's going to be two roadmaps. One for open source for core functionality, and one closed source for paid features.”
Levine: Open-Source Product-Market Fit Does Not Guarantee Enterprise Buyers
“One is your open source user doesn't lead to a buyer, and this is an example of where product market fit might be really great, but there's not value market fit to tie into it. So you have a lot of open source users, but there's no buyers.”
Levine: Aggressive Proprietary Monetization Destroys Developer Trust
“Your commercial offering kills your developer's street cred. This, again, is an example of where you may just be putting too many features into your proprietary product and almost abandoning your open source roots.”
Levine: The Open-Source Market Is Far Bigger Than Currently Realized
“And if we think of open source that way, the renaissance is really only beginning, and the market is far bigger than we have yet created or yet realized.”
Levine: Product features must inherit elements of the target sales motion
“The product, the features of the product need to inherit part of the sales motion itself, right? And that if you're going after a certain Motion or certain customer, the product needs to be reflective of that, and I think we often miss there.”
Levine: Professional Services Boost Blended Margins by Unlocking Enterprise Deals
“While services from a unit economic standpoint may be, you know, a little more expensive from a margin standpoint, if it drives very large deals with software margins, you come out way ahead.”
Levine: Novel enterprise pricing models create unnecessary sales friction
“You have to come up with pricing that the customers used to actually paying for. If you start to create something that's totally new, it creates friction in the system.”
Peter Levine: Startups that survive deep crises emerge much stronger
“Every company goes through some cathartic event, right, where it's the pit of despair, right, like nothing can go well, and the companies that pull out of that actually come out much stronger as a result. It is not A straight line up and to the right by any st…”
Levine: Bottom-up enterprise startups need hundreds of thousands of users for PMF
“That's sort of a new phenomena are enterprise companies that do have a bottoms up model whereby they do start with the consumer, which is typically a employee in a company where the product, you know, in some ways sells itself. And so that's another way of thi…”
Levine: Startup growth stalls when technical founders try to directly run sales
“In my experience, the growth kind of stops when they try to run sales too much and kind of get involved in an area where They have not a lot of experience, right?”
Peter Levine: New products or international expansion reset go-to-market fit
“Now, let me point out that if I enter into a new geography or I build another product as part of the company, you start over again. Let's say a U S geography and I want to expand internationally. Maybe my go to market model is actually different. It very well …”
Levine: Enterprise software is shifting to consumer-grade product design
“Enterprise companies actually are looking a little bit more like consumer companies when it comes to product design, fit and finish and all of that”
Levine: Mid-to-large company CEOs cannot alter current quarter outcomes
“If your company is reasonable size, there's almost nothing you can do this quarter to change the outcome of this quarter.”
Levine: Domain expert data sharing creates an open-source data model
“You take the experts who are the programmers in their field, and they then push that knowledge off to everyone else. So maybe your dad's an expert in certain parts of this, and he can participate in it. It's the open source of data, right? Everyone's manipulat…”
Levine: Data-driven digital assistants will augment workers across all professions
“I mean, in some ways it's already happening. There are companies out there who look at Salesforce productivity, looking at the most productive salespeople in an organization, learn what they do, modify that, and then go give that information to, so where every…”
Edge endpoints will process data locally instead of centralized streaming
“If you think about the new world of distributed computing, the data that gets collected in a self-driving car or some endpoint is going to be, the information will be processed at that endpoint. It won't be translated back to a central storage pool. The inform…”
Autonomous vehicles generate 10 gigabytes of data per mile driven
“Self-driving car collects 10 gigabytes of data a mile, right?”
Levine: Freemium software functions primarily as a proxy for marketing spend
“The way I think about freemium is that it's a proxy for marketing spend. You tend to have to spend quite a bit on marketing in order to get the user to see the value of a given product. What freemium does is it offsets the marketing costs.”
Levine: Mismanaging open-source communities causes contributors to fork codebases
“If you don't manage the community in a proper way, the community will say, well, they're not doing what we want. We're going to fork the code and go run off and do, we're going to just do the whole thing.”
Levine: Modern open-source communities accept that companies must generate revenue
“The open source community has matured over the years, and I do believe that the community... Is sensitive and is appreciative of companies needing to actually make revenue and kind of have a business as opposed to just being a charity where everything's given …”
Levine: Open-source startups should charge for scalability and security
“There are discrete sort of components of open source that one could argue, here's all the functionality needed for a given user, a given server, a given environment. And then the added value components may be along areas such as scalability, security, Enterpri…”
Levine: Delivering open source as SaaS bypasses traditional support model friction
“When open source is offered as a service, the pricing. Is based on the service that you actually provide, and it makes for a very nice way to work around some of the nuances of open source and the whole, what's your support model and all these other bits and p…”
Levine: Open source SaaS companies often grow by expanding on-premises
“We've seen many companies, you start with a cloud, I'll say a cloud SaaS offering based on open source. Viral adoption, great uptake. And then enterprises say, well, like we need to have that inside our firewall. We want a copy of that. So then the expansion, …”
Levine: Developers Transformed into Key Enterprise Buying Centers
“I think one of the most notable transformations over the past five years has been the pauper to prince of the developer as a buying center within a company.”
Levine: a16z Portfolio Startups Use Developer-First Wedge Strategy
“What we see are many of our startup companies now deliberately selling to developers as the first wedge point into an organization.”
Levine: Enterprise purchases naturally follow consensus among developers
“And once the developers in an organization have coalesced around a set of great tools, It becomes a foregone conclusion that the company ought to step up and go purchase those particular tools and services.”
Levine: Open Source and SaaS Are Primarily Marketing Pipeline Vehicles
“Really the whole indoctrination of open source and SaaS as a starting point is a marketing vehicle to build a pipeline for an organization.”
Levine: Viral Spread Plus Enterprise Sales Is the Winning Open-Source Formula
“Organic virality works to a certain point, but in order to be a successful organization in this new ecosystem, the notion of viral spread plus an enterprise sales organization, I think is the winning formula.”
Levine: Dell acquiring EMC creates a complete data center systems vendor
“Dell's business moving from PC to server vendor, now server vendor to systems vendor, Makes a lot of sense. I mean, that logic there does hang together. Servers and storage kind of make up, and networking make up the bulk of make up the bulk of the data center…”
Levine: Future data centers will mirror hyperscale cloud architectures, not legacy hardware
“A lot of the new data center architectures Are more going to look like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and less like older, you know, sort of Wall, I call them Wall Street data centers.”
Levine: EMC Buying VMware Was One of Tech's Greatest Acquisitions
“EMC arguably did what I think is one of the best enterprise acquisitions probably in the history of computing when they bought VMware.”
Levine: Dell excels at commodity sales, EMC at high-margin systems
“Dell is amazingly good at selling commodity components and EMC is amazingly good at selling high margin components.”
Levine: Commercial tech innovation has shifted from corporate labs to universities
“If you look at, ah, you know, a lot of, ah, innovation Up till, well, to me, re up until recently came from, like, Bell Labs and IBM and Microsoft Research, and that's where a lot of the new, I would say the new commercial ideas came from folks leaving those a…”
Levine: Transitioning from individual contributor to manager is the hardest career pivot
“I think one of the most difficult transitions a person makes in their career, whether it's from academia or from just an individual, is from individual contributor to being a manager and leader.”
Levine: Delaying open-source business models makes future monetization significantly harder
“If you don't have that early, what starts, and you don't know what that is, then potential customers and partners don't know what you're going to charge for in the future and all that, and it makes it, the longer you go on without having a model, the harder it…”
Levine: On-premise data centers give large companies an advantage over SMBs
“Large organizations who have the expertise and budgets to go create on-prem data centers have a huge competitive advantage over the hundreds of thousands of small to mid-sized companies that are probably using Excel spreadsheets as their data analytics tool ri…”