Upcoming Talk: Andrew Randall of Kinvolk on From project to company: building a business on open source
We will be hosting an industry talk in COSS, our course on Commercial Open Source Startups. The talk is free and open to the public.
- by: Andrew Randall, Kinvolk
- about: From project to company: building a business on open source
- on: December 2nd, 2020, 10:45-11:45 Uhr
- on: Zoom (link after registration)
- as part of COSS
Abstract: It’s hard enough getting an open source project off the ground. But how do you translate that into a commercially successful business? Many founders, including this speaker, start out somewhat naively with vague ideas about how business success will flow from project adoption. Topics will include defining hypotheses, testing and evolving the business model, how to build value on top of open source, balancing open source vs commercial investment, and lessons learned spinning a project out of an established company to form a VC-funded startup.
Speaker: Andrew is responsible for business development, marketing and customer success at Kinvolk, a Berlin-based open source company. He moved to Germany in 2019 after two decades in Silicon Valley, most recently as co-founder/CEO at Tigera and Project Calico, a container networking and security solution. He initially incubated Calico at Metaswitch where he ran the networking business unit, having previously held roles in corporate development, marketing, and engineering. He holds an MA in mathematics and philosophy from the University of Oxford, an MSc in software engineering from Stirling University, and an MBA from UC Berkeley and Columbia Business School.