Nailing Customer Acquisition with Patrick Backman of MariaDB and OpenOcean
The Business of Open Source3 Apr 2024

Nailing Customer Acquisition with Patrick Backman of MariaDB and OpenOcean

This week, I had a dilemma: should I prioritize the episode where I spoke with one of the MariaDB co-founders, in which we discuss setting up a foundation as a way to ensure that the project continues to be open source in the future, no matter what (relevant given the Redis announcement); or should I prioritize the conversation with one of the founders of Sonatype, one of the oldest companies in the software supply chain security space, in which we talk about the xz debacle.


I went with Patrick Backman, general partner at OpenOcean and co-founder of MariaDB, because it’s a little more in my lane. (The conversation with Brian Fox will have to wait for next week!).


One of the main things we discussed was the relationship between the MariaDB foundation and the MariaDB company. Including:


  • Why they decided to put MariaDB open source in a foundation, and why they created a separate foundation instead of putting it in an existing foundation
  • The relationship between MariaDB foundation and company today, including the financial relationship


MariaDB was founded by the founders (and some key employees) at MySQL; we also discussed the lessons learned at MySQL that the team then applied at MariaDB. And we talked about customer acquisition, one of the things that Patrick thinks the team had learned at MySQL and therefore had pretty well figured it out at MariaDB.


Patrick’s co-founder Monty Widenius is one of the speakers at Open Source Founders Summit — if you want to go into more details on with the lessons from MySQL and MariaDB, as well as lessons from being an investor at OpenOcean, join us in Paris May 27th and 28th at Open source Founders Summit.



Episoder(269)

Changing Your Price Anchor with Anais Concepcion

Changing Your Price Anchor with Anais Concepcion

There’s a new episode of The Business of Open Source today! It’s been a while. I talked with Anais Concepcion about a program she’s been testing at Grist to give free activation codes for the enterpri...

11 Feb 32min

Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen

Earning Trust with Tom Hacohen

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Tom Hacohen, CEO and founder at Svix. We kicked off the conversation by talking about why Svix is an open core company… but Tom still initially d...

8 Okt 202535min

Go-To-Market for Open Source Companies with Quentin Sinig

Go-To-Market for Open Source Companies with Quentin Sinig

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Quentin Sinig, who has been the first “business” hire at three open source companies; Strapi, Kestra and now Pruna.ai. We covered a lot of ground...

24 Sep 202534min

Open Foundations with Or Weis

Open Foundations with Or Weis

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke to Or Weis, the CEO and co-founder of Permit.io. Or is a serial entrepreneur who has had a long career in developer tools. We talked about Permit’s re...

17 Sep 202537min

Straddling open source software and the hardware industry with Rob Taylor

Straddling open source software and the hardware industry with Rob Taylor

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Rob Taylor, CTO/CSO and founder of ChipFlow. Although ChipFlow is unambiguously a software company, it creates software that facilitate the creat...

10 Sep 202534min

The double-edged sword of big initial customers with Taco Potze

The double-edged sword of big initial customers with Taco Potze

This week I’m back from vacation and I have a new episode of The Business of Open Source, with Taco Potze! Taco is the co-founder and CEO of Open Social. A couple interesting takeaways from our conver...

3 Sep 202539min

Build for Dual Audiences with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz

Build for Dual Audiences with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Pablo Ruiz-Muzquiz, CEO and co-founder of Penpot. We started out by talking about the transition from services company to product company, how th...

2 Jul 202539min

Managing community contributors with Alya Abbott

Managing community contributors with Alya Abbott

This week on The Business of Open Source I talked with Alya Abbott, COO of Zulip, about managing community contributors. This is a hot topic for open source companies — and for that matter, open sourc...

25 Jun 202536min

Populært innen Business og økonomi

lydartikler-fra-aftenposten
stopp-verden
dine-penger-pengeradet
rss-penger-polser-og-politikk
e24-podden
rss-borsmorgen-okonominyhetene
livet-pa-veien-med-jan-erik-larssen
pengesnakk
utbytte
pengepodden-2
finansredaksjonen
okonomiamatorene
tid-er-penger-en-podcast-med-peter-warren
morgenkaffen-med-finansavisen
liberal-halvtime
lederpodden
rss-markedspuls-2
stormkast-med-valebrokk-stordalen
rss-politisk-preik
rss-pa-konto