Mike Olson sold his open-source database startup, Sleepycat, to Oracle and earlier this year left Oracle to spend time with family. The family, however, had other plans and has booted him out of the house. "Get a real job, Honey!" were the words his wife used to chase him from the house, eyewitness reports reveal.
Well, Mike hasn't managed to get a real job just yet, but he will be spending some time with Hyperic, a leading open-source IT management company. According to Javier Soltero, Hyperic's CEO, Mike will be "helping us develop the next generation of killer products."
I pressed Javier for more detail over IM, and he offered up this lame response:
... Read moreI was thinking through the open source diffusion model over the last few days, and put together this slide. It's not groundbreaking by any stretch (Larry Augustin and John Roberts are much more articulate on this point than I am), but it reflects the way open source spreads.
On the open source side, you start with users and then convert them into customers. On the proprietary side, you start with marketing and sales to create customers. No users until they pay.
The key point here is in the difference in focus. ... Read more
For the second installment in the Open Source CEO Series, I caught up with Javier Soltero, CEO and Co-founder of Hyperic. Javier is a highly pragmatic open sourceror, fully buying into the open source ethos but not forgetting that customers buy value, not source code.
Name, position, and company of executive
Javier A. Soltero, CEO and Co-founder, HypericYear company was founded and year you joined it
Hyperic was founded in 2004. Coincidentally, I joined that same year. :-)Stage of funding and venture firms that have invested
Series B (closed 6/07). Investors: Accel Partners & Benchmark CapitalBackground prior to current company
... Read more
I was Chief Architect at Covalent in charge of developing products to help manage Apache and its related technology stack (Tomcat, etc.). We built the first version of what later became Hyperic HQ at Covalent in 2003 and prior to that shipped a number of management technologies for Apache/Tomcat including a configuration and provisioning system. Before that, I was senior engineer at Backflip.com (a 5-years-ahead-of-its-time high-profile bookmark sharing/social network founded by ex-Netscape people). It was at Backflip that I had my first brush with the problem of managing a large scale online service business. I also met two of my co-founders (Charles and Doug) while at Backflip. Prior to that, I was at Netscape, helping create the internet infrastructure technologies that most people today take for granted :)
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