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• A/B testing of tip mechanism vs. platform fee on Open Collective |
• Platform fee transparency and impact on donations |
• Jerod Santo's personal preference for round numbers vs. exact amounts |
• A/B testing of tip mechanism with different percentages (0% and 7%) |
• Pia Mancini's plan to implement A/B testing on Open Collective |
• Mention of Sustain community, working groups, and podcast |
• Pia Mancini thanks Adam Stacoviak for having her on the show |
• She expresses gratitude for the experience and the business ideas she gained |
• The conversation ends with a brief exchange of thanks |
**Jerod Santo:** So we're here with Pia Mancini, who's the founder and CEO of OpenCollective. Pia, welcome back to the Changelog. |
**Pia Mancini:** Thank you. Thank you for having me. It's nice to be here again. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's been too long. |
**Pia Mancini:** It's been too long, yeah. |
**Jerod Santo:** So let's just dive right into it, shall we? OpenCollective - remind the folks what it is, or for those who haven't heard of it, tell us about the platform and what y'all are up to. |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. OpenCollective is an open finances platform; it's a platform that lets you raise funds and spend them transparently, and it's paired with a whole network of not-for-profit entities around the world that act as that place where you put the money. So if you are a community, a group, an open source ... |
**Jerod Santo:** And you're no longer a fly-by-night. You've been around for a while, and so I think being established and having a history, especially for a fiscal host and a platform, is really important. So you've got that going for you. |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, absolutely. We started five years ago, and we've really grown a lot in the open source space, and we'll chat more about that... But also, we've grown - especially last year - substantially in the crises support, solidarity space, mutual aid groups. I know it's been a crazy year for everyone, but ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is the space that's outside of technology where the growth is primarily happening, or is it just bigger there now? They're both growing, but that one's growing at a faster rate. |
**Pia Mancini:** They're both growing, but that space last year grew at a rate that was completely unexpected. So this is the combination of OpenCollective the platform, plus the OpenCollective Foundation that is a 501c(3). It's a charity. The 501c(3) has never been very used, or we didn't grow very much until last yea... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[04:31\] Yeah. And it's important to understand the full platform, too. I recall talking to you, Pia, before on Founders Talk, and then this show way back when, this idea of, as you mentioned, if you don't have a legal entity in your group; you just wanna collect together and raise funds for whatev... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, absolutely. A lot more than before. In hindsight, the common thread between both growth spurts that we've had in the open source or tech space and now in that kind of mutual aid or solidarity space, it has to do with the fact that OpenCollective is best suited for groups that are -- it's like zer... |
And for mutual aid groups, we've found that it was the same. It was literally impossible for the Brooklyn Mutual Aid Group, or South Chicago Mutual Aid Group to have a functioning charity, not-for-profit, that is able to give tax-deductible receipts, functioning in like less than at least six months if you're lucky... ... |
**Jerod Santo:** That's really cool. And I think it makes sense to think of yourselves as enablers, because it's the time where either it's technically or legally either very difficult - or impossible in the case of too difficult for one person to pull off - to do a thing. Or in the case that speed is of the essence. I... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. And you know, we were doing a strategy very long call the other day... Because everyone else, we have limited capacity, and we need to decide what we are gonna say no to, and what we want to achieve... And we wanna focus on these spaces - whatever they are, but these spaces where it's just not a ... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[08:10\] So because of that do you see collectives or organizations outgrowing the platform? Do they need that marginal improvement and then the best thing for them is to move elsewhere? |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, absolutely. And look, right now, this year, for me it's about focusing a lot on the whole lifecycle of a collective. We've become really good at "You need to be up and running today? We've got you. This is what you need to sign, this is where you need to send the money, this is how you do it." It... |
So we want to focus more now on also supporting those groups... And once they transition out, what I would really like to see is for OpenCollective to also accompany these groups as they transition out... So we become kind of the backend; this kind of transparency and open finances ethos that we bring stays with these ... |
And then I guess maybe more future thinking, how can we more like strive for non-profits kind of style? So you become a collective, we help you grow, you grow with us, you raise funds... It's time for you to kind of move on. We'll give you OpenCollective as your backend, but look - it's hard to do not-for-profits; we'v... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Because the crux, the important thing is the upstart, getting started fast, the zero to something quickly... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And obviously, graduating or incubating a group or an entity or a non-profit, or a \[unintelligible 00:10:24.17\] however you wanna frame that, to a point that they can blossom and move along and self-sustain, but still use the platform would be ideal. Is that happening a lot, where that's the focus... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, we have that. We've been an incubator of really interesting initiatives. And look, also for open source, and they not necessarily moved into another not-for-profit. We've had groups that because they've been able to support the maintainers during their initial period, then they were able to creat... |
So we're saying that it's a bit tricky sometimes, and it's a challenge of mine to help the ecosystem a little bit more in governance tooling when these kinds of things happen, especially when an open source project moves into being a for-profit venture; the line between what's part of the for-profit, what's part of the... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. Has that happened with anybody? |
**Pia Mancini:** \[11:52\] Well, Gatsby is a good example. Gatsby was a collective, and now they are a super-big venture-backed, and the relationship between Gatsby the company -- I think it was well-managed, but it was well-managed because it wasn't a huge community in terms of a lot of people being very invested in t... |
**Jerod Santo:** It's starting to happen some, yeah... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. And I think Next.js is also another case where they've raised money and they became their own entity. I think they still have a collective, and they manage Octobox as well. Octobox has the company and the project, and they have different practices, but I think as a community we can start talking ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I guess because the funds in OpenCollective are transparently available to the world and you can sort of dictate -- so if you're a company, or even a project that graduates into a company and still maintains a collective, those funds I'm assuming are used for community-related things. |
**Pia Mancini:** Yes, that's exactly right. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Not really business expenses, not really business income, it's more like potentially tax-deductible funds that have been added to their collective and used in a transparent way where the community can see that and they can maybe do something with a pull request, or patch an issue, or something like ... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. So one thing that I quickly wanna clarify - the Open Source Collective, which is the fiscal sponsor of most of (at this stage) 2,500 open source projects under our umbrella, it's not a tax-deductible entity. It's a not-for-profit, but it's not a charity. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Gotcha. |
**Pia Mancini:** So I just wanna clarify that, just in case, because they have different regulations. But other than that - yes, the funds in the collective, the intention is that they are used for community stuff. Definitely, we wouldn't pay back into a company. Our by-laws or our regulations wouldn't allow us to do t... |
I think it's positive that open source projects find different business models, and that more maintainers make a great living out of doing this... So I'm by no means saying that this is wrong, I'm just saying that sometimes we need to walk that line, and as a community, we need to discuss what are best practices. |
**Jerod Santo:** It's worth mentioning that a core tenet of OpenCollective is the open side, and that's transparency. So it's transparency with money coming and money going out. All the expenses are itemized and explained and visible, and that's really cool. I wonder if that's been perhaps problematic for certain group... |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah, for sure. Radical transparency is never easy, and social pressure is tough... And it's also a hard ask on maintainers who are like -- most of them are really good developers, and great at what they do; they might not be the best at managing communities or people, because it's a different skillset... |
\[16:07\] It's tough, I get it, but for us, that is a non-negotiable space, because I feel like the benefits of having this level of openness by far outweigh it. And also, the uncomfortable moments... Also, I think that as a community we should also take stock of how poorly some of these folks are paid, and we should b... |
One of the main goals of the Open Source Collective is making working for your open project, for your community something that is comparable to working for a corporation. And the only way of getting there is paying maintainers a competitive salary. We really wanna erase this choice of like "Oh, I need to be poor and wo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Money causes a lot of problems, especially in groups; I think the transparency is certainly a competitive advantage, because when you bring together a group, you have to have trust around funds, even if it's like -- like, that's got to be the core thing, that brings groups there for one, but then en... |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** "...the ledger is what it is." You may be able to say "Hey, you shouldn't have done that, or in your case, Jerod, where you mentioned "You should have paid yourself more, why didn't you do that", but at least it's there, and the questions can be asked, and all those details are out there. |
**Pia Mancini:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's a competitive advantage, in my opinion. |
**Pia Mancini:** Absolutely. I think that we have worse problems with our transparency than what everyone is getting paid. I think that where we really have struggled with this kind of radical transparency stance that we have is when we risk exposing community members like trans folks, or they struggle with a chosen na... |
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