Anand Babu Periasamy

Yeah, actually, this is the one that close to our heart, in you know, that while we we are doing startups, the reality is for us that it when we did last or last time, the team came together because they were passionate about about open source. In fact, a while I call open source, we are the Free Software guys, right? You know the difference. And the the new prison speech not as in beer. Exactly right. And a, it was out of passion that it grew. But when you do when you when you build products, with passion is the attention to details and craftsmanship, they get noticed. And that is how it led to success. Not because we are a bunch of entrepreneurs, we wanted to make money. And we got together and figured out what will make more most money. It didn't happen like that. And because we were passionate about open source back then it I call it open source simply a it's a company kind of hurts me when I say open source every time. But when I say free software, a being a purist, very few people really understand it. But the truth end of the day shows up right? The cluster is the case. And when I was a case, you see there is nothing proprietary here it is 100% pure open source or free software model. And why it matters. like back then customers used to ask me like a open source means it's inferior. is it's not secure. Know, they used to ask all these questions, and it has come a long way. Now you can see even VMware has to look like overnight is an embrace Kubernetes every large deployment, particularly in the data space, that we find customers actually are mandating open source for their infrastructure. Because they have seen even big companies killing products shutting down every few years on these products that enterprise depend upon with open source, you can easily hire top talent across the world. And it is it's no longer a problem right now when it came to governance that for now, how do you how do we run our work across a compared to other other open source projects, we took a benevolent dictator model, right. In fact, it's not a pure benevolent dictator, I would say it's like benevolent dictators, all the way down. A My job is to make sure that the I continue to grow more and more leaders, everyone in the team is empowered to make decisions within their scope. And a it The hardest part for me is it's like you have one giant canvas and you have a bunch of artists. And our goal is to create one piece of artwork, right one mind, it is not quite, it's not easy, they, but you have to be opinionated. And you have to bring everybody to see the same vision. And this has to extend beyond our team into the community. Right now we we we are able to see the scale at which we grow like like 324,000 downloads a day, maybe some of them are ci CDs, but by all measures our like saved 3300 members on our Slack channel, every every like 18,000 GitHub stars, any number we look at, we have deep penetration. But the key here is we are not an Apache Foundation, our Linux Foundation project, we what I found was that the moment you bring in a consortium on the board, you have multiple chefs and then every vendor has their own commercial interests, it becomes really hard to drive a project, I found that being being a benevolent dictator model being up needed. If you are true to your costs, you will be able to build a powerful community and the community showed faith in us that they don't need a third party nonprofit organization to endorse that we are, we are a company that we can be trusted. And they have seen this even in the past, like bluster, and no longer involved, but it is a project that is still thriving without me. Even some of the core members, right? That is the one that's giving users a lot of confidence that we understand what we do. And ANVBV for us open source is not a business strategy. It is a philosophy we believe in light, and they are able to see through that. And combined with that you also have to build product with with the craftsmanship, like thinking like an artist, and minimalist culture. If you establish the culture, that culture is the one that actually brings the right kind of people together. And once you once you bring those people together, then you can't stop it, right it it becomes a way of life for them. And they get emotionally attached. Some of these guys that wherever they go, they are almost like attached, emotionally attached to not only mean IO, everything they do afterward they want to do it like this. That is the one that is giving the stability for governance and the stickiness and sustainability for long term.