Kevin Muller on Seeking Out Harsh Feedback and Commercializing too Soon

The Business of Open Source

Kevin Muller is the CEO and co-founder of Passbolt, a security-first, open-source password manager, and he joined me to talk about the risks of having too much time and money, the value of getting trashed on social media and why he values in-person interactions with the team.

There were a lot of interesting pieces to pick apart from this episode. First of all, Kevin talked about the importance of not commercializing too early. I think he's the only founder I've ever heard say something along those lines, but he makes a good argument. (Also, Tim Chen and I talked about the timing of commercialization last week, my takeaway is that no one feels like they commercialized at precisely the right moment). Second, we had a good discussion about how the different priorities of European versus American investors can push companies to make different decisions. The subtext that we didn't address directly is make sure you are aware that your investors priorities are going to influence how your company evolves, choose your investors with that in mind. (and check out the episode with Markus Düttmann if you want more on the EU vs US investment environment for open source startups). Lastly, password managers have been in the news, and not in a good way — and how to best react to a super embarrassing situation for a competitor is not always obvious. So we talked about how Passbolt has tried to steer the conversation about password management in light of recent high-profile hacks in the ecosystem.

Highlights:

• Kevin introduces himself and describes his work at Passbolt (00:26)
• How Kevin got the idea for Passbolt and the story of how he brought his idea to life (01:07)
• The mistakes that Kevin and his co-founders made when launching Passbolt (05:03)
• What happened when Kevin and his co-founders officially launched Passbolt in 2016 (08:12)
• How Kevin and his co-founders decided to move from a purely open-source product to a commercialized product (09:32)
• Why Passbolt is a hybrid company and the value Kevin sees in having employees spend time in the office (12:41)
• Kevin describes why it was so important for Passbolt to be an open-source company (15:58)
• Why Kevin feels it’s important not to commercialize an open-source product too quickly (19:07)
• The different priorities of European VCs versus U.S. VCs (21:58)
• Why honest feedback is so valuable and how Kevin and his team evaluated the feedback they got at the launch of Passbolt (24:26)
• Kevin’s reaction to data breaches that happen to other password management solutions (27:09)
• The biggest challenges that Kevin and the team at Passbolt are working on currently (31:09)
• Kevin’s advice to open-source founders (32:47)

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmuller80/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/passbolt/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/passbolt
• Company: https://www.passbolt.com