如何成为10亿美元级公司？开源独角兽公司HashiCorp、Confluent谈成功经验｜GGV投资笔记第九十期
GGV有话说：
GGV投资笔记是GGV纪源资本关于投资、商业、科技的所见所闻所想，探讨关于世界的一切。
在这里，你可以收获：
全球优秀科技公司管理经验、一线调研；
顶级风险投资人&创业者经验分享；
大航海时代的世界人文历史、商业见闻……
以下是GGV投资笔记系列第九十期。
作者：Glenn Solomon
几十年来，软件工程团队一直通过构建、使用和整合免费的开源代码打造复杂的应用。而在过去两年，开源声名大燥。HashiCorp、Confluent、Databricks和GitLab等开源软件公司市值已达几十亿美元，为开源商业模式做了背书。
我最近和Confluent的联合创始人兼董事会成员Neha Narkhede、HashiCorp的 CEO Dave McJannet在GGV纪源资本第五次互联网变革大会（Evolving Enterprise）上进行了交谈。
GGV纪源资本很早就认识了Confluent，2014年投资了HashiCorp，二者目前的市值分别为185亿美元和51亿美元。Neha和Dave讨论了为什么他们会选择开源模式、从开发者社区转变为盈利模式的挑战，并同开源企业家分享了他们的经验。以下是一些有意思的对话片段：
Q
打造解决具体问题的开源工具
Confluent联合创始人Neha：
创立Confluent要追溯到大约10年前，那时另外两名联合创始人和我都在领英工作。我们创建了 Kafka 开源栈，因为我们找不到可捕获不同数据的可用工具，例如页面视图和数据库更改捕获日志，我们需要汇集这些数据，然后输入到旨在进行实时分析的所有下游系统中。当时的技术均无法拓展到与我们所输入的数据规模相匹配的水平，无法对输入数据完成实时分析，因此我们自行打造了我们所需要的工具，即Kafka。Kafka发布后，数千计的开发者开始下载使用。由此我们意识到，我们应该将Confluent打造为一家公司，为所有在生产中使用Kafka的公司提供服务。
Q
引导协作并将其融入开发过程
HashiCorp CEO Dave：
我们所有的产品，从Terraform到Packer，再到Boundary和Waypoint，在项目早期阶段都是创始人为解决潜在的基设施问题而启动的。我们的行动方针一直是将项目放在Github上，然后邀请所有人参与协作。开发者通过协作打造代码扩展器解决自身面临的问题并增加功能性等过程令人叹为观止。Terraform Core的开发过程中有超过1500人参加，但他们并非HashiCorp的员工。他们的贡献为我们的开发过程奠定了坚实的基础。
Q
先打造稳健的开发者社区，然后盈利
Confluent联合创始人Neha：
在Confluent前几年，创始人在推广和社区发展上投入了大量时间。我们写博客、在会议上发言、打造社区电子邮件列表，等等，所花费的时间实际上和写代码的时间一样多。但这些努力至关重要，因为我们是在同一类别下打造这些事件流，确保Kafka成为所有数据平台的基本构建模块。前期开发者使用Kafka为后来Confluent提供“软件即服务”（SaaS）和企业产品开辟了道路。在免费核心产品积累了足够的下载量后，大型企业便开始需要我们在扩大使用范围、增加安全性或协作、在本地或公共云软件上管理应用方面提供协助。
Q
找对技术人员，促进有机增长
Confluent联合创始人Neha：
我们很多工程师都来自我们的开源社区，他们当中的很多人不仅有出色的技术能力，还会参与到撰写博客、会议发言的工作中，因此我们相当于为他们提供了写代码兼推广的综合类职位。他们帮助核心开发者推广团队将面向开发者的精准内容发布到播客、博客、社交媒体和会议上，因此对于我们要触及的目标群体——真正的开发者来说，我们的开发者推广项目真实且有用。
Q
打造开发者想用的工具，然后将付费产品卖给老板
HashiCorp CEO Dave：
我们能够接受我们的产品在很长一段时间里被开发者超负荷免费试用，这十分重要，可以让产品在真正的目标用户群中成为标准工具。在开源领域，如果打造了一个产品，99%的人可以免费使用，而试图只对剩下1%的人收费，这并非是一个好的商业模式。因此我们会免费推出工具，直到这些工具达到被开发者稳健使用的程度，随后我们会打造解决诸如安全性、协作性等企业级问题的周边产品。我们永远不会试图变现我们的核心科技，相反，我们会围绕该核心科技销售一整套周边工具以解决组织复杂性问题。
以下为英文版：
Advice from Open source Unicorns: How HashiCorp and Confluent Became Multibillion-Dollar Companies
For decades, software engineering teams have been building, using, and combining free bits of open source code to build complex applications. But in the last two years, open source has, well, come out into the open.
Companies selling open source software including HashiCorp, Confluent, Databricks, and GitLab have attained multibillion-dollar valuations, legitimizing the open source business model.
I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Neha Narkhede, co-founder and board member of Confluent, and Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp, at GGV’s fifth-annual Evolving Enterprise event. GGV has been fortunate to know the Confluent team and to invest in HashiCorp, now valued at $4.5 billion and $5.1 billion respectively.
Neha and Dave discussed why they chose the open source model, the challenges of transitioning from developer-focused communities to profitable businesses, and shared lessons for open source entrepreneurs. Here are some excerpts from our conversation.
Q
Build open source tools that solve specific problems.
Confluent Co-founder Neha：
The foundations of Confluent go back about a decade when my two co-founders and I were working at LinkedIn. We created the Kafka open source stack because we couldn’t find an existing tool to capture disparate data like page views and database change capture logs, and bring it together to feed all of our downstream systems that were trying to do real-time analytics. None of the existing technologies could scale to our level of data input and couldn’t do real time, so we built what we needed and that was Kafka. And then once we put Kafka out there, thousands of developers began downloading it. So we realized we needed to create Confluent as a company to serve all the enterprises putting Kafka into production.
Q
Invite collaboration and make it part of your development process.
HashiCorp CEO Dave：
All of our products, from Terraform and Packer, to Boundary and Waypoint, started out as early projects our founders created to try to solve underlying infrastructure challenges. Our tack has always been to put our projects up on Github and then just invite anyone to collaborate on them. It’s amazing to see the collaboration from developers who build code extenders to solve issues they have, add functionality, etc. We have over 1500 contributors to Terraform Core who are not employees of HashiCorp. Their contributions are a huge cornerstone of our development process.
Q
Build a strong developer community early to generate profits later.
Confluent Co-founder Neha：
For Confluent’s first few years, the founders spent a great deal of time on evangelism and community development. We wrote blogs, spoke at conferences, and contributed to community email lists, and more. It took as much time as actually writing code. But it was critical because we were building event streaming as a category, ensuring Kafka became an essential building block for all data platforms. Early developer adoption of Kafka then created a funnel for Confluent’s SaaS and enterprise products. After enough downloads of your free core product are out there, large enterprises start needing help to expand usage, add security or collaboration, and manage applications on premise or in the public cloud software.
Q
Make the right technical hires to fuel organic growth.
Confluent Co-founder Neha：
We have hired so many engineers out of our open source community, and many are not just great with technology, but also engaged in writing blogs and speaking, so we gave them a sort of hybrid role of coding and evanglistm. They help our core developer advocacy team to get the right developer-focused content onto podcasts, blogs, social media, and at conferences, which makes our developer advocacy program authentic and useful to those we’re trying to reach: actual developers.
Q
Build tools developers want to use, then sell paid products to their bosses.
HashiCorp CEO Dave：
We are OK with our products taking a long time to burn in with developers because it’s important they become standard tools for the people who actually use them. In the world of open source, if you build a product that 99% of people use for free and then try to charge the other 1%, that is not a good business model. So we focused on getting our free tools to a point where they were very robust for developers. Then, we built adjacent products that solve enterprise-level problems such as security and collaboration. Our core technology is never going to be monetized, but instead we sell a whole slate of tools around it to solve for organizational complexity.
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