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slash disclosures. Hi, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm DOS, and in this episode, we pull

Mike Kelly, CIO of Red Hat into a hallway style conversation with A16Z general partner,

Peter Levine, as part of our annual A16Z Innovation Summit, which happened late last year.

We cover a lot of ground. They finish with M&A,

given Red Hat has both been acquired and been an acquirer. Along the way, though, they touch on

open-hybrid architectures, when an open-source project becomes a product, and where services

come in for an open-source startup. They start with a quick take from Peter on his classic

post from 2014, why there will never be another Red Hat. Red Hat did such a great job in

pioneering what I call open source 1.0, the free and support model, that their scale and capacity really made them a one-off.

As a startup, to be able to go and create the same backend infrastructure is quite expensive

to go and do. So let me go one step further here. I don't believe there will be another Red Hat with the Red Hat

business model. However, I believe that there will be many, many, many successful open source

companies into the future that have different business models from Red Hat that are further

unlocking the potential of open source, specifically

open source as a service. If we look at the history of open source, as soon as the economics come

into balance with the technology, we see entrepreneurs flourish and the community flourishes because

there's sustainability. And I think

this whole SaaS, you know, open source as a service has unlocked a whole new economic model.

Peter's article ended with maybe even Red Hat should think about becoming the next Amazon.

...