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**Jerod Santo:** Yeah, I'm sure you did. So at a certain scale, those people do exist. But I agree, they're on the margins. But they're also big customers, right? I mean, Twitter would have been a huge customer for Fauna. |
**Evan Weaver:** Twitter would be a great customer, but in reality, that classic company is nobody's customer. Google, Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce, LinkedIn, whatever - they all have the capacity to build completely custom databases in-house if need be. So you don't get the kind of vendor-customer relationship you do... |
We see a lot of usage where there is kind of a classic IT organization -- this is similar to the Mongo story, in some ways... There's a classic IT organization, they have the official way to do things, but it takes a lot of work; file your JIRA tickets, get your machine provisioned, you have to justify everything to ev... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Did you evaluate the open source nature of it? There's some companies who'll use it as a -- I guess community adoption, there's a lot of things around there. You'd said that nobody is gonna crack open their database codebase and start wielding it... Jerod used Twitter as an example - sure, at that s... |
**Evan Weaver:** We did, and we continue to evaluate it... Because the market changes, and what people need changes. We decided what people want are the benefits -- there's a certain section of the market which is religious about being open source. Like, fine. Those people don't use Amazon either. They might use hardwa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Evan Weaver:** \[56:06\] The benefits you get from open source, the things that really made it take off, especially in the '90s with LAMP, where it was free to try, and it fit with the rest of your development environment. And that fit really means standard interfaces. So the things we value about open source that we... |
**Jerod Santo:** Good answer. Anything else, Adam? |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Not necessarily... I can somewhat agree with you. I mean, there's no real benefit, because you have to think about what you're optimizing for as a company; what you're optimizing for as a company is to build a successful product, a successful database that solves the technical challenges first, not ... |
**Evan Weaver:** Yeah, there's a slow trend away from that model. The thing that people really hang on to is the sense of transparency and trust they get from the open sourceness nature of the database, the portability, the idea that you can switch from one vendor to another is important to a lot of people. In reality,... |
But I think as we move in particular to a wider variety of cloud databases composed around these standard and proprietary interfaces in particular, one of the things that we're working on that we're excited about is better ability to query the same data from different query languages in the same database. At that point... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What do you think the biggest challenge is for you right now, given the place of the market? Business-wise, even though you're CTO now and you've hired for a CEO, despite that - not saying you can't play a role in those by any means, but... Talk about future funding... What's the biggest challenge y... |
**Evan Weaver:** \[59:49\] I think at this point the biggest challenge is really keeping up with our customers. Building a database is a slow process. It's not that kind of slapdash code development you would typically see at an early stage startup. But that doesn't mean the market goes slower to match you. We have ton... |
There's no one else really doing what we're doing in the market, and that means the bottleneck to our growth, to satisfying our customers, to giving everyone a better Fauna experience is really us and our ability to execute on the vision that we laid out several years ago. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So it's time to accelerate, basically... |
**Evan Weaver:** Yeah, exactly. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's on the horizon then? You mentioned your customers are not slowing down by any means; that means you have to move faster to keep up, even though you can't move fast, because -- or not so much can't, but it's not by nature the way you build a database... What's on the near horizon? You mentione... |
**Evan Weaver:** Our focus is twofold. It's on maturity and resiliency for customers who are already successful on Fauna. We launched the Region Groups feature earlier this year; more region groups launching... We'll have a better backup and restore capability, that's more under direct user control, that kind of thing.... |
Then at the same time, the other area of focus is really the adoptability. Making FQL easier to use, making GraphQL more standards-compliant, eventually building other popular query standards on top of the same database kernel. Making sure that Fauna is always the easiest thing, both operationally and in terms of the d... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is there anything that we haven't asked you that you're like "Man, I really just wish they would ask me about these things"? You're speaking to a developer audience, potentially future customers, or at least curious about what you'll solve in the future. They'll pay attention... Is there anything we... |
**Evan Weaver:** Yeah. We talked a lot about trust, like "the databases, this scary thing that can never be changed." There's no risk to trying it out. So I'd just encourage people to go to the website and click the sign-up button. Database provisioning is instantaneous. You can go through the tutorial, play around wit... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You've mentioned the Free Forever before... So you've got a Free Forever monthly plan, you'd mentioned the Docker image you could use locally... Does that Docker image locally require a sign-up, or is that something you can just pull down from Docker Hub, or whatever? |
**Evan Weaver:** It's not an authenticated package. You can get it and run it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay. You can try without signing up if you want to then, through the Docker image. |
**Evan Weaver:** You can. It's just the email, where you can use GitHub or Vercel or Netlify identity to sign up as well. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Cool. Evan, thanks for the deep-dive into all things Fauna. We really appreciate these technical deep-dives. Going back to the white paper, Dr. Abadi that you've mentioned as a board member for you... We'll link up the blog post that we've kind of referenced to some degree in this call here, in our ... |
**Evan Weaver:** You're welcome. Great to be on the show, great to meet you. |
• OpenCollective is an open finances platform that allows communities, projects, and groups to raise and spend funds transparently |
• The platform acts as a fiscal host or sponsor, providing a business bank account or not-for-profit bank account for groups to receive funds |
• OpenCollective has grown in both the open source and solidarity spaces, with the latter growing at a faster rate |
• The platform is particularly suited for groups that are just starting out and need to raise funds at a global scale |
• OpenCollective envisions itself as an enabler, providing a service that wouldn't exist otherwise for groups that are zero to one |
• The platform is focusing on supporting groups as they grow and transition out of the platform, maintaining the transparency and open finances ethos |
• Discussion of transitioning from a collective to a non-profit organization |
• Challenges of navigating the line between open-source and for-profit business models |
• Examples of successful open-source projects transitioning to for-profit ventures (Gatsby, Next.js) |
• Transparency and accountability in financial management through OpenCollective |
• Potential drawbacks of radical transparency, including social pressure and difficulties for maintainers |
• Goal of paying maintainers a competitive salary to make working for an open project comparable to working for a corporation |
• Trust and transparency in group funding |
• Limits of radical transparency in funding and identity protection |
• Conflict between transparency and privacy in funding |
• Funds for Open Source initiative on Open Collective |
• Streamlining corporate funding for open source projects |
• Grant-making feature for open source projects |
• Transparency in corporate funding and disbursement |
• Open Collective's fund model and its benefits for companies |
• Pia Mancini's personal experience with Duane O'Brien and Indeed's FOSS Contributor Fund |
• The role model of Chrome's fund in Open Collective |
• The need for companies to invest in the open source ecosystem and be responsible citizens |
• The importance of enabling and facilitating companies to support open source projects |
• The gap in providing tools and resources for companies to understand and implement open source funds |
• Pia Mancini's vision for creating a "sustainer toolkit" for companies to support open source projects |
• Open Collective wants to start a fund and needs outreach to corporations and foundations |
• Funds can be created for specific projects or themes, such as Web 3 projects or internet freedom |
• Corporate funds, like those from Samsung and Salesforce, are being formed |
• Topical funds, where multiple companies pool resources for a specific type of project |
• The Digital Infrastructure Fund and Internet Freedom Fund are examples of large funds |
• Impact is difficult to quantify due to lack of tracking and analytics, but Open Collective does post publicly available data |
• New money in is being tracked, with some funds totaling over $2 million |
• The influx of new funds is seen as a positive development for the collective and the communities it supports |
• Difficulty in visualizing long-term financial sustainability due to irregular and unpredictable income |
• Need for better metric tooling for collectives to track revenue, donor churn, and other financial metrics |
• Open Source Collective has raised 15 million dollars in the past two years |
• OpenCollective has shifted to a tips-based model, eliminating platform fees for many projects |
• The organization has been experimenting with tipping as a way to sustain itself |
• The CEO, Pia Mancini, has been using an executive coach to navigate financial challenges and make tough decisions |
• The organization has changed its business model in response to the pandemic and has prioritized enabling community support and collaboration. |
• Adopting a tipping model to increase revenue, which has been successful in increasing tips to 6-7% |
• Moving to zero platform fees for charitable collectives, with tips being the primary source of revenue |
• Realigning incentives with hosts and other not-for-profits by offering a 15% share of their host fees |
• Scaling costs with user growth, with a focus on providing services to support community economic power |
• Considering expanding the zero platform fee model to the open source space, but recognizing the challenges and risks involved |
• Discussing the importance of corporate support in the open source ecosystem, and how it may differ from individual support in the charitable sector |
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