This is part of The Pile, a partial archive of some open source mailing lists and newsgroups.
modperl@apache.org Subject: [OT] Starting a Company on OS [Was: mod_perl longevity] [Was: From: Gunther Birznieks <gunther@extropia.com> Date: Wed, 06 Dec 2000 07:18:55 +0800 I thought I would change the topic yet again. :) At 02:58 PM 12/5/00 -0500, Ajit Deshpande wrote: >On Tue, Dec 05, 2000 at 11:34:49AM -0800, brian moseley wrote: > > i had lunch with doug and jon swartz not too long ago, > > talking about the possibility of starting a web application > > infrastructure company based on mod_perl and mason. when we > > got down to it, the fundamental question was: why not just > > use java? and we couldn't find any answer other than "i like > ^^^ ^^^^ > > perl better". and that's not a reasonable business > > justification. That's a very techie thing to think about. I'll stay out of this part of the conversation as I said my piece on it in several other threads over the past 2 years. :) I would be very careful about setting up a business entirely around mod_perl for several reasons (couched in an anecdote about my experience starting a company). We started a company around our open source products 8 months ago and left the cushy full-time job sector. While I don't regret starting the open source company I have say several things that we discovered (really common sense but)... 1) Even if you hire a good business team to back up you as techs, at least one of you will not be coding or engineering anymore. You will be business development/sales/marketing/providing support in writing and revising the business plan, making the next strategic alliance, closing the next big deal (big deals take a lot of time to close both length of time and building the relationship). The mod_perl community will definitely lose one of you guys for sure. 2) Service/Consulting contracts extremely time consuming to administrate if you want to manage it "right". 3) It's a bad idea to make a company dependent on the fact that you have 3 really hot-shit developers because (A) one of you will be taken away for business things, almost guaranteed (B) Your clients will want YOU to work on it not someone you hired and trained -- because until they've been working on mod_perl for several months, it is unlikely they would be doing work. In the meantime you pay someone a salary to learn enough to be good enough (so prepare for a 1-3 month buffer of paying salary). (C) Service based company's make money off of headcount not off of a few good people. 4) Unless you are injecting a lot of cash into your company or know someone who will, you will not reach a critical mass of directly billable headcount necessary to generate revenue which will take care of the "overhead" you need to hire to grow a company beyond a couple of people (CEO, Business Development, COO, Marketing, WebMaster/Graphics guy (invariables infrastructure contracts ask if you can also take on a tiny bit of apps work and then it will also be an issue of doing graphics for their site) and CF0) maybe in that order ... but that's another room for debate that's not for this list. It's really hard to do this on your own money. We started our company with 5 people. 2 techs, 3 business. We've grown in 8 months to 15 people. But the process has not been easy. The first 6 months definitely took me away from posting here (some would say that's a good thing) and it's completely taken away the other tech who I started with as he is still mired into doing business stuff. If he has spare time it isn't to do open source as much anymore as to code to generate revenue so we can hire more people. Of course, getting funding is cool (the VC route), but we haven't done that route. The VCs we've gone to all want over 51% of your company to give you money (especially these days)... Losing control sucks when you are doing something you are passionate about (open source). And they also want to see that your team has run a business from scratch before. This was a minor problem for us when we started looking at funding opportunities, although not anymore as the same VCs are now impressed we survived and prospered without funding at a time when dotcom's have been dropping like flies. Dotcom Funerals are really hard to watch and demoralizing also. I would not want to see a mod_perl-based dotcom funeral because some VC was controlling the company and that VC doesn't understand open source. Of course, this may be sour grapes, but at this stage, although funding would be fantastic, I shudder to think that if we had funding from the wrong VC or investor then we would be screwed. Anyway, the summary of this story is that running a business if really hard. I thought going into it that quiting my full time job to work in an open source company would mean more time to do open source and advocacy. Boy was I wrong. The process of starting a company took me out for 6 months, and only now am I getting back into it. I love doing the company thing and I've learned a lot about real business (especially making the hard decisions that you have to when you dont have gobs of money), but it's still completely not what I expected as a techie. ===