Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal. We've talked quite a bit about open source on the podcast already, from the topics of open versus closed, to managing community and identity, to selling to developers. And a few years ago, partner Peter Levine put out a piece arguing why there'd never be another red hat, which is one of the only open core business models to survive. But given the current and coming wave of companies built on top of open source, the tricky question left to discuss is, how do they make

money? And joining us to have that conversation, we have James Waters, who's the SVP of product

at Pivotal, a cloud platform company that runs software and multiple clouds, and they're part of VMware.

And then also moderating this podcast, we have general partner Martine Casado, who himself came out of VMware, which had acquired the company he co-founded

and was CTO at previously Nicerra. And he's the first voice you'll hear. One of the paradoxes

in this entire space is there's been a ton of money that's been invested in open source, but almost

no examples of successful companies built around it. Silicon Valley

had a spidey sense that there was an opportunity there. Nobody pulled it off. Now there's a number

of examples of open source companies doing very well. James is one of the few people on the planet

that's cracked that, where they've figured out how to monetize and build a big business out of open source. And just to give a sense of how real this is, Pivotal Count Foundry went from

zero to $270 million in license, not support. What does that mean in license? In license and software sales.

Oh, so it's not professional services. Because that's a step that has like, that's the thing we talk about

all the time in terms of building businesses is that you don't necessarily want to rely on professional services because it doesn't give you a lot of margin on your business.

Exactly. So this is like legitimate software sales.

So James, tell us how you went from 0 to 270 and million we're talking about seconds. How did you do it?

Yeah. And I think it's fair to describe kind of my maturation and my thinking about this through failures, too.

I worked on Open Solaris at Sun. And then for a while at VMware, we were looking at how do you

monetize Spring Source in and of itself. Franksource is like the most popular Java programming

framework in the world. Bought by VMware for pretty famous money over $400 million as an open

source project. I had worked on that, you know, both of those

projects and had gotten my bumps and bruises along the way. And so I had some very particular

opinions coming into doing the third round of PCF, Pivotal Cloud Foundry. I think there's kind of two

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