Building a Sustainable Platform With Abigail Cabunoc Mayes

05/10/23 • 23 min

"Fueling a culture of openness in innovation and research." That slogan is well known to Abigail Cabunoc Mayes, a leader in GitHub's open-source maintainer program. With a background in open science, Mayes felt right at home when jumping to open source and mentoring many developers at the Cloud-based Hosting service.

On this episode of The Business of Open Source, listen to Mayes speak on sustainability and resilience in building a platform for developers and what makes a robust and sustainable environment. Mayes also talks about financial stability and models in the open source world and what it truly means to break from a main backer and build on your own.

Highlights:

Supporting "maintainers" (3:02)
Succession planning (3:38)
Being resilient in sustainability (5:40)
Building financially without company backing (6:29)
GitHub experimentation (10:42)
Strategies for critical projects that are lower in the stack (11:55)
Technical sustainability (13:47)
Hypothetical financial models (19:33)

Links:

Abigail

Highlights:

Supporting "maintainers" (3:02)
Succession planning (3:38)
Being resilient in sustainability (5:40)
Building financially without company backing (6:29)
GitHub experimentation (10:42)
Strategies for critical projects that are lower in the stack (11:55)
Technical sustainability (13:47)
Hypothetical financial models (19:33)

Links:

Abigail

Previous Episode

Investing and Monetizing a Start-up With Akriti Dokania

Akriti Dokania, a heavyweight in the venture capital business, is a partner at Ridge Ventures. With a background in computer sciences and building a B2B company from the ground up, it is no wonder Dokania is an expert in the complexities of developing software and understanding the lifecycle of a start-up.

On this week's episodes of the Business of Open Source, Dokania shows her wealth of knowledge in investing in open source start-ups. She also explains what founders should look for in an investor and the struggles of monetization for an open source start-up. Lastly, Dokania gives the secrets to working towards a revenue model and scaling a start-up to a fully fleshed-out company.

Highlights:

Open source vs. non-open source companies(from an investor's eye) (2:07)
The go to market for open source (4:03)
Disadvantages of an open source start-up (5:29)
Too deep into open source to monetize (7:53)
Red flags a founder should look out for in an investor (14:24)
Common mistakes for open source companies looking to monetize (16:24)
Unique business strategies in open source (19:24)

Links:

Akriti

Next Episode

Developing Open Source Coding Tools with Daniel Loreto

Daniel Loreto, the founder of Jetpack.io, is a massive believer in transforming how engineers scale their backend for cloud-based platforms. Deeply rooted in the tech industry, Loretto takes great pride in building tools to large usage scales and utilizing them to attend to the needs of his users and community.

On this episode of the Business of Open Source, Hear about the inner workings of jetpack.io and its challenges in its history. Also, listen to Loreto's tips for success for a startup, his navigation of open source and proprietary coding, and why Loreto is not an open source purist.

Highlights: