Lessons from 20 Years of Bootstrapping an Open Source Business to $50M+

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Building a successful open source company without venture capital is rare - scaling it past $50M in revenue is even rarer. This talk distills two decades of hands-on experience growing and sustaining a commercial open source business from zero to global scale.

We will share the real strategies that worked - navigating product-market fit, monetizing open source while keeping the core free, building a distributed team long before remote work was mainstream, and developing a repeatable go-to-market engine without external funding. We’ll also explore what didn’t work, the pitfalls we hit along the way, and the lessons learned from building a business that competed against well-funded alternatives.

Heap on Percona Community

Lessons from 20 Years of Bootstrapping an Open Source Business to $50M+