Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be happy to. Shall we make it a video call other people can join too? Tomorrow, Saturday, at 11:00 Pacific? I'll be in https://gitlab.zoom.us/j/351494573 at that time for anyone that can discuss their application publicly. If you attend please comment so, if you can't also comment so we can try to find an alternative. By the way, I'm a YC participant and not a YC partner. I don't speak for YC and I'm just trying…
We will be there as SalesLoggr,we are sending our application to the email address on the comment above thanks for doing this
What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
51–60 of 70 posts
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be happy to. Shall we make it a video call other people can join too? Tomorrow, Saturday, at 11:00 Pacific? I'll be in https://gitlab.zoom.us/j/351494573 at that time for anyone that can discuss their application publicly. If you attend please comment so, if you can't also comment so we can try to find an alternative. By the way, I'm a YC participant and not a YC partner. I don't speak for YC and I'm just trying…
I'm in on this, thanks very much.
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
No problem, please email kirsten@gitlab.com to coordinate a time, please link to this comment, if you want it the next 2 days my preference is Sunday 4pm Pacific but I'm not sure that works for you. I propose we do https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-operations/ceo-pref... (you get to redact the notes)
The time and process are both fine by us. Just sent an email to Kirsten -- thanks for taking the time again!
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
In your Y Combinator application, you say: "...to create and grow a competitive open source offering you need to have a proprietary commercial version to generate scalable revenue, support income alone is not enough. " I've often wondered if you can make money selling an open source software product that isn't dependent on support or services. In your application form, you're essentially saying this isn't possible. D…
Another open core YC founder here. Can confirm it's the best way to go. Pure oss tends to become services heavy quick. Another thing to think about: If your open source support is good enough, they may not pay for your support offering either.
Of course some products and markets have been able to make the support model work, like RedHat.
But it is very hard to pull off and I think it used to be easier in the past when companies where very worried about support and licensing. Nowadays they are much more comfortable with open source.
What we are seeing is that companies that pay for our premium support tend to cancel that after the first year because they didn't need it.
We want to make a product that is easy to install and maintain. This reduces the demand for support. There is a incentive for companies selling support to be a bit less aggressive documenting everything.
An open core model needs a very careful balance between being a good steward of the project and the need for revenue. We documented what we learned so far on https://about.gitlab.com/about/#stewardship and keep our ears open on forums like these.
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another open core YC founder here. Can confirm it's the best way to go. Pure oss tends to become services heavy quick. Another thing to think about: If your open source support is good enough, they may not pay for your support offering either.
Thanks for chiming in, I totally agree. Of course some products and markets have been able to make the support model work, like RedHat. But it is very hard to pull off and I think it used to be easier in the past when companies where very worried about support and licensing. Nowadays they are much more comfortable with open source. What we are seeing is that companies that pay for our premium support tend to cancel t…
and the consensus has been that you need a lot of components for the support contract to work.
One difference we've found for example that seems to work pretty well is providing support for deep learning models. Each "model" solves a problem like "face detection" "cat finder" "fraud detection" and we charge for the platform used each time for each model. This reflects the amount of work we do for customers but also provides an SLA for deep learning they might not otherwise have.
Source control has a wider user base and tends to favor an easy to install integrated experience.
Machine learning applications tend to have fewer people who know how to build them but they are just as critical for the business.
Eg: points of accuracy in a model can directly map to revenue or profits. That's easy to explain to an enterprise customer.
So despite the smaller potential user base "data scientists" in this case, we've found it fairly easy to go to market.
One thing I think people miss is that the bulk of open source infrastructure companies tend to be devops or operating systems with lots of moving parts.
They don't tend to be applications or machine learning.
I think what a lot of us are finding is that you have to innovate on the business model itself in order to really capture value for both your user and the customer as well as your startup.
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
wildfire looks kindof cool.
Yeah, jnpatel (Jay's) app http://www.wildfireapp.io/ does look cool. I wonder how they get the data for that.
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for chiming in, I totally agree. Of course some products and markets have been able to make the support model work, like RedHat. But it is very hard to pull off and I think it used to be easier in the past when companies where very worried about support and licensing. Nowadays they are much more comfortable with open source. What we are seeing is that companies that pay for our premium support tend to cancel t…
We've had conversations with board members at most of the major open source companies (eg: large and private or public) and the consensus has been that you need a lot of components for the support contract to work. One difference we've found for example that seems to work pretty well is providing support for deep learning models. Each "model" solves a problem like "face detection" "cat finder" "fraud detection" and w…
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#58Reading through your YC application, you were already so successful ($1M in rev, 60% growth rate, 1M users), did you ever have second thoughts about going through YC? If you had not gotten in, what would you have done otherwise? Congrats on your success!
Thanks! We never had second thoughts about YC. We did talk a lot during YC if we wanted to take outside investment. If you take investment you need to work to a liquidity event (acquisition or IPO). Since we would like to stay independent the only option is an IPO. Not many companies make make that. But we also wanted to make GitLab a great and popular solution. For this we need the best marketing and sales people. W…
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks! We never had second thoughts about YC. We did talk a lot during YC if we wanted to take outside investment. If you take investment you need to work to a liquidity event (acquisition or IPO). Since we would like to stay independent the only option is an IPO. Not many companies make make that. But we also wanted to make GitLab a great and popular solution. For this we need the best marketing and sales people. W…
I'm very curious about the part where prospective employees wanted options, implying you need a liquidity event anyway. Aren't there other models for that? For instance, a partnership track setup, or paying dividends on shares, or some other sort of revenue sharing? Equity in profitable privately owned bootstrapped companies must be valuable, or there would be no incentive for the founders of such companies, so why n…
Re: What Founders Ask Founders About Getting into Y Combinator
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be happy to. Shall we make it a video call other people can join too? Tomorrow, Saturday, at 11:00 Pacific? I'll be in https://gitlab.zoom.us/j/351494573 at that time for anyone that can discuss their application publicly. If you attend please comment so, if you can't also comment so we can try to find an alternative. By the way, I'm a YC participant and not a YC partner. I don't speak for YC and I'm just trying…
Sounds great, looking forward to chatting with you and others!