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• Raj Dutt's early life and experiences starting his first company Voxel in 1999 |
• Lessons learned from building and running Voxel as an organic, slow-growing business with no outside funding |
• The "Voxel mafia" term coined by TechCrunch to describe the success of Voxel alumni who went on to start their own companies |
• Grafana Labs' approach to building a sustainable open-source business, focusing on long-term growth rather than quick exits or short-term gains |
• Capitalization and cash flow constraints at Voxel |
• Importance of long-term thinking and avoiding short-term exit strategies |
• Definition of "long-term greedy" approach to business |
• Balance between community adoption and monetization in open source companies |
• Remote-first and international workforce strategy at Grafana Labs |
• Tension between value creation and value capture in open source businesses |
• Prioritizing interoperability as a core value for the company |
• Embracing a "big tent" philosophy that values collaboration and coexistence with other vendors |
• Avoiding "rip and replace" mentality in favor of integrating with existing tools and platforms |
• Focusing on being a trusted advisor to customers rather than trying to take over their entire platform |
• Recognizing the importance of respecting customers' choices and existing investments in technology |
• Balancing the tension between open source values and commercial goals, including making decisions about which features to make open source or commercial. |
• Importance of a strong community to Grafana's business |
• Balance between open source and commercial offerings |
• 95% of Grafana's engineering effort focused on open source |
• Monetization strategy: creating a large community and then targeting a small percentage for commercial sales |
• The role of the community in providing feedback, contributions, and validation |
• Comparison to a traditional software company: without a strong community, it would be like "pushing a string up a hill" |
• Advantage of having 500,000+ companies using Grafana as a foundation for commercial sales |
• Open source model based on value creation rather than capture |
• Discussion on the similarities and differences between freemium and open source business models |
• Importance of freedoms in open source software, including redistribution, use, modification, and derivative works |
• Tension between company values and sales goals in a growing company |
• Role of leadership in maintaining company culture and balance between different departments |
• Challenges of scaling a company while preserving a collaborative and respectful culture |
• Discussion on organizational sales and revenue growth stages |
• Hiring a sales team too early can lead to mistakes and poor understanding of how to sell and package products |
• Grafana Labs waited until they had revenue generation before investing in a sales team, which helped them avoid common pitfalls |
• The company's success in building a mature sales team was due to hiring the right people at the right time, particularly Graham Moreno from MongoDB |
• A strong HR/People Ops function, led by Alex Farrell, has been instrumental in maintaining culture and scaling the team effectively |
• Grafana Labs' low employee attrition rate is attributed to its focus on building a positive company culture. |
• Company culture is crucial in determining success, but it's not just about recruiting the right people, it's also about making sure existing employees stay. |
• The company has evolved from being remote-friendly to truly remote-first, with a focus on hiring globally and eliminating the idea that certain locations are more important than others. |
• The transition required checks and balances, leadership, and a willingness to adapt, and has led to a dramatic change in how employees feel about their role within the company. |
• Remote-first policies have allowed the company to be more global, hire the best people regardless of location, and provide better work-life balance for employees. |
• The impact of COVID-19 on company culture in remote-first environments |
• Importance of in-person meetings and social bonding for teams |
• Difficulty in building relationships and trust online compared to in-person interactions |
• Challenges of hosting conferences virtually, including lower engagement and difficulty replacing hallway tracks |
• Comparison between virtual and in-person attendance numbers (20,000 virtual vs. 500 in-person) |
• Virtual conferences are more accessible and can reach a wider audience |
• In-person conferences require significant resources and planning |
• Sponsors may be harder to secure for virtual conferences |
• GrafanaCon Amsterdam was shifted from in-person to virtual due to COVID-19 concerns |
• Raj Dutt's company has doubled in size since Series A funding, reaching 160 employees |
• The company is investing in various projects, including Prometheus and Loki |
• Observability and open source are growing areas of interest |
• The company has raised a $50 million Series B round |
• Global economic uncertainty |
• Strengthening balance sheet and optionality |
• Investing in community and products |
• Launching open source projects and enterprise/cloud products |
• Raising series B funding for increased firepower and hiring |
• Focusing on composable observability platform |
• Prioritizing interoperability and developer experience |
• Exploring new use cases and future directions for Grafana |
• Discussion of breaking news involving investors and Grafana Labs |
• Raj Dutt's perspective on the importance of surrounding himself with a strong team as CEO |
• The concept of a "North Star" - a guiding principle or philosophy that guides decision-making, even if not always followed perfectly |
• The idea that being self-aware and intentional when violating one's North Star is key to maintaining balance and making necessary decisions |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Raj Dutt is the founder and CEO of Grafana Labs. Grafana has become the world's most popular open source technology, used to compose observability dashboards. We use Grafana here at Changelog. |
Raj and team are 100% focused on building a sustainable business around open source, and they have this big tent open source ecosystem philosophy that's driving every aspect of building their business around their open source, as well as other projects in the open source community. But to understand the wisdom that Raj... |
Raj, what happened in 1999 to make it a pivotal year in your life? |
**Raj Dutt:** Well, for me, Adam, that was this little company... And at the time, in '99, it wasn't even a company, because we weren't even sure that it would become one... It was more of a project. It was called Voxel. I was a freshman in college, and was super-interested in Linux, and just really wanted to do someth... |
\[04:01\] So at the time, there weren't a lot of people running production systems using this kind of toy open source project that hardly anyone had heard of... And myself and a bunch of friends from RPI basically started this ISP hosting company, kind of cloud infrastructure company using Linux, putting it into produc... |
We ended up running Voxel for about 13 years, built it completely organically. Myself and the whole team really had no idea how to run a company; we had no business doing this. There wasn't a lot of experience, there wasn't a lot of -- you know, we were a bunch of 18-year-olds, what did we know? But there was a lot of ... |
We build kind of a little business, got it up to about 50 people, built it slowly, bit by bit... As you know, hosting is kind of a pretty capital-intensive business, so we were always struggling to find money to buy more servers. This was pre-cloud, obviously; Amazon didn't really come along until 2006-2007, somewhere ... |
It was a ton of fun. Very stressful, also... And then I'd say we transitioned into actually becoming a business after a few years, by the time people were either graduating or dropping out. None of us wanted to get real jobs, so we kind of made this our thing... And ended up getting some really good clients. A lot of d... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Dot-bombed, yeah... \[laughs\] |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, it was a ton of fun, and really a good learning experience. A lot of the people from Voxel kind of ended up going on to do really interesting things. My partner, Zach Smith, ended up starting another hosting company called Packet, that he just sold to Equinix a few months ago. One of our most talent... |
In fact, there was a TechCrunch article that came out a few months ago that called it "the Voxel mafia." That was a really kind of fun term, and that's the way I look at it... So for me, this current company is in many ways kind of like a do-over; we get to take a lot of those lessons and try to not make the same mista... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. I mean, double down on what works, for sure. Anytime you find out what does work, 10x it, right? Do it until it stops working. That's the age-old marketing shtick - if you've found something that works -- or sales, or pretty much anything. I suppose it could work anywhere, but... If this works... |
What's interesting is the -- I'm not sure I totally understand the mafia part of it, if it's a bad thing or a good thing, but that you've enabled others to move on and do awesome stuff. I'm familiar with Jacob Smith. Not Zach, but Jacob from Packet. I talked with Jacob a while back. I never ended up working with him, b... |
**Raj Dutt:** \[08:25\] Yup. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And to do something that actually was successful for many years - not just like five years or so... it's more than a decade. Kudos to you for doing anything from college that lasted more than a decade. I mean, most businesses fail, and fail early. Yours didn't. |
**Raj Dutt:** Yeah, that's fair, but we also kind of grew it super-slowly, which is no longer the MO, it seems, with startups these days. Nowadays it's all about raise a ton of money, fail fast, go big, go home, that kind of thing... Not necessarily by choice, but just because it was the only option available to us. We... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** True. |
**Raj Dutt:** We had no concept of a burn, or even being able to have a burn. If we had a burn, it meant we'd go out of business. So yeah, it was just a different environment, different world... Starting in 1999 meant that we were a year away from the dotcom crash. And once that happened, the idea of a company like tha... |
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2020 Founders Talk Transcripts
Complete transcripts from the 2020 episodes of the Founders Talk podcast.
Generated from this GitHub repository.
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