Buyer-Based Open Core with Zach Wasserman

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Zach Wasserman, co-founder and CTO of Fleet. This was a fabulous episode for many reasons, but then again I never do crappy episodes, right?

The first thing I wanted to call your attention to is that Zach talked about how he’s building an open core business because building an open source business is what he wants to do. When his previous company turned away from open source, Zach left to do consulting around OSquery and Fleet (the project). I always like to talk about how companies / founders need a solid reason for building an open source company… and “this is the kind of company I want to build” is a very good reason. (“Everyone else is doing it” on the other hand, is not a good reason). Everyone puts constraints around the type of company the want to build, and as long as you are intentionally about the decisions, there is nothing wrong about this, business-wise.

Second, we talked about the tension that exists between making a great project and still leaving room for a commercial product that people will pay for, and Zach talked through how Fleet uses a buyer-based open core strategy to decide which functionality to put in the enterprise version or in the open core.

We also talked about:

• Leaving his first company, Kolide, when the founders had divergent visions about where the company should go
• How his investor arranged a ‘co-founder marriage’ for Zach and his co-founder Mike McNeil
• How the transparency aspect of open source can be extremely important, especially for anything in the security space

Lastly, Fleet happens to be a former client of mine. You can check out what Mike, Zach’s co-founder, said about working with me here.

And if you’re interested in more conversations like this… but in person!!! you should come to Open Source Founders Summit May 27th and 28th in Paris.