Open Source

Heavybit General Partner Joseph Ruscio welcomes our attendees and shares his perspective on the state of open source in 2023.

One of the advantages of a bottom-up open source go-to-market is that when done well, it’s the most efficient flywheel for product adoption, developer marketing, and inbound sales. The problem is that when teams attempt to cross the chasm into larger deals, there’s often a disconnect between what developers have already championed, and between what procurement and risks teams will allow. In this session we discuss what steps early founders can take to capture developer love, while still being taken seriously and whitelisted as enterprise OSS vendors.

How do you decide what to build next, and where it lands in your oss offering? Learn from our panel of experts how to connect OSS community activity to your commercial products and services. We'll discuss what signals are most valuable, mistakes to avoid when shipping new features, and how to make all your users and customers feel valued and heard.

In this talk, Nicholas Erdenberger will provide an overview of effective sales strategies and tactics for open-source products and services. He'll cover the unique challenges and opportunities that come with selling open-source offerings and how to effectively navigate them including understanding the open-source customer, leveraging community and network effects, differentiating from proprietary alternatives, and developing a sustainable revenue model. Nick will also provide practical tips and examples of successful sales approaches in the open-source space.

Learn from our expert panel of VCs who specialize in open source businesses what they look for when deciding whether to invest. We'll define exactly it means to be a venture-scale open source company, the most important metrics for indicating real traction, and finally we'll examine what the next generation of oss startups will need to look like to find success.

On top of solidifying complex OSS commercial licensing agreements early, one challenge for founders scaling an OSS company is that traditional enterprise SLAs do not seem to apply. The result is often a tangled web of multi-layered custom contracts, brittle or orphaned tracking systems, and professional service stop gaps. How can early stage founders avoid taking on more liability than they can handle?

In our finale panel we'll dig into the current state of open source licensing and what is and is not open source, what the current trends around BSL mean for the future of open source communities and companies alike, and finally how generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, Bard, and others are disrupting the OSS landscape, for better or worse.

Join us for drinks and light appetizers at Dogpatch Studios directly following the conference, from 5pm-7pm.