Taking a hard look at what community means and if every OSS company needs one with Deepak Prabhakara

The Business of Open Source

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with BoxyHQ co-founder and CEO Deepak Prabhakara. We talked about a number of things, from BoxyHQ’s relationship with its open source project, called SAML Jackson to how to build a growth flywheel and how that flywheel does and does not depend on a community.

• Is BoxyHQ a security company? Does it matter either way?
• Starting the open source project at the same time as the company, and why they did it that way
• The relationship between the user community and the customer community
• BoxyHQ as the anti-platform — instead of trying to build a platform, which is the default goal for a lot of companies I speak with — they are explicitly trying to build a more a la carte experience for users
• The challenges of community building around a project that isn’t sexy and how to build community that isn’t project-focused, but rather that’s focused around a problem space
• Making the mistake of assuming your startup is completely unique and unlike any others!

We talked about much more as well, and it’s definitely an episode you should check out.