← About Jesse Robbins

Open source as a business strategy

Open source is one of the most powerful go-to-market strategies in developer tools, and one of the most misunderstood. I learned this building Chef.

Developers trust tools they can read, modify, and contribute to. That trust converts into adoption faster than any sales motion. Chef grew one of the largest open-source communities in infrastructure software. It was adopted by Facebook, Google, Apple, and IBM. Community became our superpower. Marketing spend does not replicate that.

The founding thesis was to open up the tools that Google, Amazon, and a few others kept as closely guarded secrets. We founded Opscode and created Chef to bring world-class infrastructure automation to everyone. A bottoms-up approach worked. Developers adopted the tool because it solved their problem, and enterprise deals followed when organizations realized their teams were already using it.

The hard part is the transition. The first time someone says “your documentation sucks” instead of improving the wiki, you know you have crossed from community to vendor. None of us want to be that shitty enterprise organization we created products to replace. If you are successful, that is your future. You get to make it suck less. You have to deal with it no matter what. You become what you disrupt.

As an investor, I look for the same pattern. Snyk, Netlify, Tailscale, Continue, and Sanity all use open source or developer community as core go-to-market. The question I ask is whether the community becomes a real superpower, or whether it is just a distribution tactic. The difference is whether the community feels ownership over the tool, and whether the company respects that ownership as the business scales.

Further reading