Here's the two-hundred sixteenth issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company category newsletter, brought to you every weekend by the team at OSS Capital, creators and stewards of COSS Community and Open Core Summit.
We deliver only the most fresh 😋 news from the previous week in COSS across: Funding, Content, Jobs, Liquidity and $COSS (Public Markets).
Last week saw $1.37B (!!) in funding announcements from Krutrim AI Labs, a major release for Bittensor, product-building threads from Shopify and Cal.com, and more!
Enjoy!
💰 COSS Funding: $1.37B
- Krutrim AI Labs, India's frontier AI research lab, announces ₹2,000 Cr ($228.7M) investment by founder Bhavis Aggarwal with commitment for ₹10,000 ($1.14B) add-on investment in next year. Link
- Bhavish Aggarwal: "Announcing the @Krutrim AI lab today! ai-labs.olakrutrim.com While we've been working on AI for a year, today we're releasing our work to the open source community and also publishing a bunch of technical reports. Our focus is on developing AI for India - to make AI better on Indian languages, data scarcity, cultural context etc. Here's a list of models we're releasing ..." Link
📚 COSS Content
JJ: "There is only one investment that is absolutely guaranteed to always pay off handsomely .... In any environment. Open source. Invest in open source and it will set you free." Link
Tom Dörr: "Open source compliance platform" Link
JJ: "Bittensor is paying $1 billion / year in very liquid $TAO rewards for anyone on earth who contributes to designing, shipping and scaling open source AI --- on many dimensions. You don't need VC. You don't even need a startup. You certainly don't need capital. This figure will very soon grow to tens of billions of dollars equivalent in $TAO over the next year." Link
JJ: "Great to see @maybe on fire . Awesome work by @Shpigford." Link
Peer Richelsen --- oss/acc: "don't raise money before you have something that works. it leads to unnecessary pressure and poor terms. instead, talk to customers, understand their pain points, and build solutions to their problems. get as far as you can without investment, even if it means freelancing on the side. When you do raise, you'll be in a much stronger position with a proven product." Link
Vamsi Kurama: "Don't build Open source alternatives; build better alternatives that are Open source." Link
The Logan Bartlett Show: "Episode 130 with @photomatt (Co-founder WordPress, CEO @automattic): - Reflections on the recent WordPress controversy - Lessons on handling backlash as a CEO - Future of open source AI & more Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/60uQ6X... YouTube: youtu.be/tZaQmFQswm4?si..." Link
Ventura Labs: "x.com/i/article/1887..." Link
Laτenτ Holdings: "So proud to see our CTO & co-founder @KibibyteMe with dozens of soon-to-be-merged PRs in this monumental RAO upgrade hitting Bittensor $TAO mainnet very soon! dTAO is here. Vune is a force of nature:" Link
Alex Atallah: "Decentralized providers on Bittensor have been silently cranking up DeepSeek Data from the free openrouter endpoint" Link
JJ: "This disgusting racism will only serve to massively accelerate the ALREADY HUGE advantage China (and India btw, the west is also increasingly racist toward Indians) have over the USA. Facts: China is growing 200%+ faster than US. India is 4-500% faster and can easily sustain 1,000% for years in many areas." Link
const: "the first ever mass adoption crypto product which isn't a financial instrument" Link
Bailey Pumfleet: "Guys, I'll die on this hill: Most companies are sales companies pretending to be product companies. 95% of our team at @calcom is product and engineering. Why? Because I'd rather build something incredible than hire 100 salespeople to sell something mediocre. Our users can tell the difference. When enterprise teams switch to Cal, they're shocked by how fast we execute... We've built more features in the last month than most competitors did all year. You see, while others focus on sales decks, we're coding. While they're having strategy meetings, we're executing. The funny part? Good products actually do sell themselves. And that's why Cal grows faster with zero sales team than companies with hundreds of salespeople." Link
Peer Richelsen --- oss/acc: "v4.9.5 is out @calcom look at that changelog -- it's been one week github.com/calcom/cal.com..." Link
Peer Richelsen --- oss/acc: "thinking about bringing the entire enterprise MSA & order form in-house (using @liveblocks) - no more google docs back and forth - central place to discuss and approve redlines - once approved, auto redirect to @documenso - hook up stripe subscription" Link
Peer Richelsen --- oss/acc: "yes please! would love to collaborate. should we build this into an open source project? maybe a new starter kit that has: - a predefined markdown - remove all the extra features - a button to "confirm contract" - integration with documenso.com/embed @documenso" Link
MJ: "This is true for open source software. High quality PR's are a great way to make new friends." Link
Bailey Pumfleet: "In @calcom, we share everything Metrics Salaries Mess-ups... You want to know why we do this? Because I wish I had this info when I started. Secrets and gatekeeping only help the giants. Being this open and transparent is scary, but it's the way to build." Link
Peer Richelsen --- oss/acc: "the scheduling industry is still in its infancy. most people have never interacted with a scheduling product, yet think of all the appointments we make: dentists, barbers, lawyers, banks our market is humans meeting humans, and that's enormous. in five years, we could see a 4x increase in the industry if we go from 0.5% market penetration to just 2%. the opportunity is massive, and we're just getting started." Link
Steven Tey: "Big news: @dubdotco just crossed 1,000 paying customers! It took us 1.5 years to get to 500 customers, and just 6 months to get to 1,000 customers. Truly grateful to all our customers for the support -- we're excited to keep growing to 2K, 5K, 10K customers and beyond" Link
Josh Pigford: "Another day, another round of @maybe early access! app.maybefinance.com/early-access Big addition this time around: EU bank syncing!" Link
Josh Pigford: "the @maybe repo keeps ending up on @github trending and now we're juuuuust shy of 40,000 stars in 1 year." Link
TechCrunch: "Researchers created an open rival to OpenAI's o1 'reasoning' model for under $50 tcrn.ch/4aMr0vS" Link
bluesky: "Happy first birthday to Bluesky! We launched the app publicly on Feb 6, 2024. With every day, the need for an open network that puts people first becomes increasingly clear, and we're excited to be building it alongside 30M+ of you. bsky.app/download" Link
Bailey Pumfleet: "Calendly is a sales company. The CEO is a salesperson, and 90% of their team are salespeople. They've been around for 12 years and haven't built any of the thousands of features that people ask for. @calcom is the opposite: a product company. We're 90% engineers. We've built every little thing everyone wishes Calendly had. That's it... that's the tweet." Link
Startup Archive: "Shopify CEO Tobi Lutke explains Goodhart's law and why he doesn't like KPIs or OKRs "Goodhart's law is real. The moment a metric becomes a goal, it's no longer a useful metric... No metric by itself is a complete heuristic for a complex busines ..." Link
Tom Dörr: "Open source compliance platform" Link
Bailey Pumfleet: "Let me tell you the biggest lie in tech... "We're not ready to launch yet." Spent all week talking to founders stuck in this trap. Always one more feature... one more bug fix... gotta make it "perfect." My take: perfect gets you zero users, zero feedback, zero revenue. When we launched @calcom, it barely worked. Like, seriously... bugs everywhere, missing features, looked like shit. Overtime, user feedback helped us fix all these things and now our product is a household name. You have to get over your initial fear of being perfect. Nobody is perfect but everyone can get better overtime." Link
Cal.com: "what ive done" Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
- JJ: "Berkshire is now sitting on $325 billion of cash ... largest % of holdings (30%~) since 1990!" Link
- CoinDesk: "DCG's Silbert called decentralized AI "bigger than bitcoin," highlighting firm's $105 million worth of deAI investments, including in Bittensor's $TAO in a new public letter. by @realDannyNelson trib.al/TAgWoNr" Link
🛠️ COSS Jobs
- 5,516 jobs and 329 companies hiring! Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
- $COSS markets up 1.04% last week
- Latest $COSS markets as of last Friday at market close, courtesy of Koyfin
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