The Business of Open Source18 Kesä 2025

Building a Dual Growth Flywheel at GitLab with Nick Veenhof

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nick Veenhof, Director of Contributor Success at GitLab. GitLab has probably the most well-articulated open source strategy out there, and we talked about the two main prongs of that strategy, the co-create strategy and the dual flywheel strategy. We also talked about incentivizing individuals versus incentivizing companies and how to build recognition system as part of the way to encourage people to contribute. We also talked about how to make sure that contributing is accessible — thinking about the “time to success” for contributors in a similar way as how you would think about time to value for software users.

The dual flywheel strategy

This strategy is based on the idea that as an open source company you want to simultaneously push growth in your open source user base and your customer base, and that the two should reinforce each other.

The co-create strategy

The co-create strategy involves encouraging paying customers to contribute to the open source project. In other words, customers who are already paying are encouraged to also invest engineering resources to improve the product. Nick said that this has obvious benefits for GitLab, but it also has benefits for the customers. They end up with a much better understanding of the product, and end up getting more out of the product then they would otherwise.

If you want to learn more, I highly recommend having a look at the GitLab Handbook, particularly the section on strategy.

And if you want more information about working with me, check out the options here.

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Applying the lessons from Docker with Solomon Hykes

This week on The Business of Open Source, I have the first episode I recorded on-site at KubeCon Salt Lake City (and the only full-length episode), with Solomon Hykes, CEO and co-founder of Dagger, an...

20 Marras 202439min

ATO Special Episode with Nithya Ruff

In this special episode of The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Nithya Ruff, director of Amazon’s Open Source Program Office (often referred to as an OSPO). We started out talking a little about ...

13 Marras 202415min

ATO special episode with Peter Farkas

In this special episode recorded at All Things Open, I talk with Peter Farkas, CEO and co-founder of FerretDB. We talked about about MongoDB and the license change fiasco and why Peter wanted to build...

12 Marras 202416min

Selling Peace of Mind with Bhaskar from YottaDB

This week’s full-length episode is with Bhaskar, founder of YottaDB. This episode was recorded on-site at All Things Open last week, and we covered a wide range of topics. Including:How the open sourc...

6 Marras 202429min

ATO Special Episode with Tatiana Krupenya of DBeaver

This special episode of The Business of Open Source with Tatiana Krupenya, CEO of DBeaver, was recorded on site at All Things Open 2024. It’s a short conversation, so we addressed one main question: W...

5 Marras 202413min

Behind the Scenes of the Open Source AI Definition with Stefano Maffulli

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director of the Open Source Initiative, about the definition of open source and… the definition of open source AI. We...

30 Loka 202432min

Price Anchors of Zero Dollars with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Anais Concepcion and Paul Fitzpatrick , the co-CEO of Grist Labs and CTO of Grist Labs. We talked about managing growth of users versus growth of...

23 Loka 202442min

Getting people to use the features you already have with Eric Holscher

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Eric Holscher, co-founder of Read the Docs. We had a really far-ranging conversation that included talking about why documentation is often so ba...

16 Loka 202445min

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