COSS Weekly #51

COSS Weekly, Issue #51: October 17th, 2021

Here's the fifty-first issue of COSS Weekly, the global commercial open source (COSS) company category newsletter, brought to you every Sunday afternoon (Pacific Time) 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, Liquidity and $COSS (Public Markets).

COSS is going mainstream with the epic GitLab IPO last week + $356.1M in new funding announcements. Open Core Summit is back, December 7 - 9th, and open for registrations. And some lucky attendees will receive this GitLab NFT, memorializing this week's moment in COSS history! Let's dig in!

💰 COSS Funding: $356.1M

• Plume, building a platform for smart home services, announced their $300M Series F led by SoftBank. Link

• Vue Storefront, building a frontend platform for headless ecommerce, announced their $17.4M Series A led by Creandum. Link

• Spacelift, building a flexible management platform for Infrastructure as Code, announced their $15M Series B led by Insight Partners. Link

• Open Source Security Foundation, working to secure the open-source ecosystem, announced a $10M annual funding commitment from companies including Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Ericsson, JPMorgan Chase, Red Hat, Dell, and Oracle. Link

• Akuity, modernizing the cloud native toolchain with Argo, announced their $4.5M Seed led by Decibel Ventures. Link

• EngFlow, speeding up build times through distributed compiling, announced their $3.7M Seed led by a16z. Link

• Remix, makers of a framework to help you build better websites, announced their $3M Seed led by OSS Capital. Link

• ContainIQ, providing dashboards and monitors for Kubernetes native monitoring and tracing, announced their $2.5M Seed led by Lachy Groom. Link

📚 COSS Content

• Peer Richelsen: "i wrote a piece about working as an Open Startup inspired by @levelsio and @asynchio" Link

• ConsenSys Holds Funding Round Talks With $3B Valuation by Jamie Crawley, Ian Allison. Link

• Bhavuk Kalra: "@GitHubIndia just opened a new office in Hyderabad, India and they chose to call one of the conference rooms after@hoppscotch_io. Now I'm even more enthusiastic about the features that we have planned for upcoming release." Link

• Peer Richelsen: "i just wanted to let everyone know my mum successfully booked a time in my calendar with http://cal.com without help. that means our product is officially 'mummy-proof'." Link

• JJ: "Thrilled to share something super fun today... For EACH attendee of our upcoming 3rd annual @OpenCoreSummit 2021 (December 7-9th), we are minting and randomly giving away 20,000+ NFTs in celebration of the $15 BILLION + raised in COSS (VC, M&A, IPOs). (Continue thread)" Link

• Jerry Chen: "1/ Open Source vs Cloud Castles. Open source has been one of the better strategies when competing against Big Cloud." Link

• Naval: "Web 2: Users are the data, corporations own the platform, and the code is closed. Web 3: Users own their data, contributors own the platform, and the code is open." Link

• Tobi Lütke: "Noco is impressive! Played with it on the weekend." Link

• ^ Nocodb's reaction: "Exact moment when you realise. - You are in midst of pushing a hotfix for a recent release! - And somebody we admire deeply follows us. @tobi #original #nocode #Shopify #buildinpublic #opensource #Startup." Link

• Solomon Hykes: "The ongoing debate over open-source licensing is just a proxy war between infrastructure vendors. Pure software against all-in-one, startups against incumbents... We would be better off if everyone was honest about this instead of claiming the moral high ground." Link

• Michelle Mannering: "See the latest radar feat: @RowyIO. Tweepy. @plotlygraphs' Dash. SciKit. PyG. @MaterialUI. @calends. @GitHub's VS @Code theme.@PrettierCode's VS Code theme. MonitorControl. @phoboslab's Q1K13 in @js13kgames. Maybe you'll find inspo for #Hacktoberfest " Link

• swyx: "This year I've done a total 180 on open source strategy. Remember Elastic making a fuss with "Amazon: NOT OK"? I was quite persuaded. If MongoDB, Redis, Cockroach, Confluent relicensed and do fine, maybe SSPL just becomes acceptable "open source". Now I think MIT is just fine." Link

• Julius Volz: "We have come full circle: @PrometheusIO was inspired by Google's internal Borgmon monitoring system, now Google is launching a managed service for Prometheus." Link

• JJ: "Big congrats to my friend @jzemlin on this truly awesome announcement and effort." Link

• Peer Richelsen: "productivity has been insane. team has been merging 40 pull requests per week. that's 8 a day without weekends." Link

• See M30, the open source public cloud platform from Micro. Link

• ^ JJ's response: "Very promising open source AWS alternative by the brilliant Asim Aslam and crew." Link

• JJ: "About to walk the @KubeCon_ sponsor exhibit hall this afternoon in Los Angeles for the first time IRL since pre-COVID. Excited!" Link

• Peer Richelsen: "once you start optimizing for stakeholder value instead of shareholder value, you'll end up generating 10x more value for society, and in fact, 10x more value for shareholders." Link

• Alex Weidauer: "Wow! @Rasa_HQ now has over 100 people. Stoked to be working with such an amazing & diverse team. Very proud that we don't only talk about #DEI, but take action. Long way to go, but one example result: 42% women and non-binary folks in technical roles." Link

• JJ: "NFTs are useless and worthless, you can easily copy and paste the JPEG! Open source is useless and worthless, you can easily fork the code!" Link

• @zeeg: "Real talk, open core is not open source. If it requires a license to use or modify, its not open. We need to stop tightly coupling it with open source, and we need to stop alienating other alternative models with less restrictions (like BSL)." Link

• OpenUK: "State of Open: The UK in 2021 Report, Phase 3: The Values of Open, has landed! https://openuk.uk/stateofopen/ #openuk #stateofopen #opensource." Link

• Angela Strange: "1/ Open source will catalyze the financial services industry's biggest evolution to date. In this $25T industry, increasing power & influence will shift from suits to developers." Link

• Tobi Lütke: "Nice tribute to someone a lot of us miss." Link

• JJ: "The area under the curve of "software eating the world" is large at this point, and the growth rate has slowed. But open source is eating software a LOT faster ... while the area under this distinct curve is smaller, the trend is far more profound." Link

• Jonas Andrulis: "Why does our large language model has a better taste in soccer compared to GPT-3? Nicely put together in this review of current players and approaches @OpenAI, @AI21Labs and @Aleph__Alpha." Link

• JJ: "New post on DAOs by my incredible partner Heather Meeker: "Should your next company be a DAO?" https://coss.community/cossc/should-your-next-company-be-a-dao-2o44 // @COSS_Community @HeatherMeeker4." Link

• Dave Neary: "A new episode of #OpenSourceinBusiness has finally landed! @migueldeicaza talked to me about his 30 years in free software as a hacker and entrepreneur." Link

💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)

GitLab IPO Reactions!

• COSS Community: "@gitlab https://sec.gov/Archives/edgar." Link

• Ron Miller: "GitLab raises IPO range, targeting valuation of as much as $11B https://tcrn.ch/3DC70Kz via @techcrunch." Link

• GitLab: "We're celebrating $GTLB making its @Nasdaq debut! We get to share it with you as the first company to publicly live stream the entire end-to-end IPO listing day. Welcome to the DevOps Platform Era. #EveryoneCanContribute." Link

• Guillermo Ranch: "GitLab Inc., from YC's Winter 2015 batch, is YC's first open-source company to go public" Congrats @sytses, @gitlab team & @ycombinator." Link

• Immad: "Gitlab IPO values it at $11bn, hard to believe GitHub sold for "only" $7.5bn in 2018. Presumably GitHub would be worth ~5x more today. Just got to HODL." Link

• Dave Munichiello: "By leading GitLab's $20m round in 2017, we chose the deeply technical team, the truly differentiated bundled product, and the authentic open source approach that we envisioned winning over the long term. Read more: https://gv.com/news/gitlab-ipo/ (3/8)." Link

• Jason Warner: "Weirdly emotional day for me today GitLab IPOs & naturally folks talk about GitHub & our acquisition & as the executive primarily responsible for the product turnaround & the architect of the sale, I have major pos/neg feelings on it it all." Link

• JJ: "Two newly-public COSS co's have created nearly $40 BILLION in equity value this year alone: @ConfluentInc + @GitLab ...! And YET, this is only the beginning of the $500B+ COSS category (which grew by 30X+ over the last decade) graduating to the public markets." Link

• JJ: "Special Edition 1 of 50 @GitLab COSS NFT to celebrate and memorialize today's IPO milestone. Thank you to @sytses and @dzaporozhets for accelerating the advent of an open core future! #GTLB #EveryoneCanContribute." Link

• Ari Levy: "GitLab jumps 22% in its Nasdaq debut after pricing well above range $13.5 billion market cap at open 58x revenue multiple - higher than all but 4 companies in Bessemer Cloud Index (http://Bill.com, Snowflake, Cloudlfare, Asana)" Link

• Armon Dadgar: "Huge congrats to the @gitlab team on their IPO! Awesome to see their success and another great showcase for OSS companies." Link

• Mitchell Hashimoto: "GitHub for $7.5 billion by Microsoft in my mind still goes down as one of the cheapest, highest value acquisitions of all time. Absolutely incredible steal, especially in light of the $GTLB IPO today (also on that list is Instagram at $1B and YouTube for $1.65B)." Link

• Geoff Lewis: "Awesome watershed moment for open source software companies with today's @gitlab IPO." Link

• JJ: Huge progress toward our upcoming $COSS ETF...Nearly a (current) total of > 15 public COSS companies: In 2021 alone = @gitlab @confluentinc @couchbase @Kaltura @ForgeRock. ++ @cloudera @elastic @MongoDB @rapid7 @ProgressSW @qtproject @fastly @WANdisco @jfrog @digitalocean" Link

• Product Hunt: "In 2015 @gitlab launched on Product Hunt and earned #4 Product of the Day. 6 years later, an IPO! Congrats to the team on this amazing milestone in adding $GTLB to @Nasdaq. Travel back in time: https://producthunt.co/posts/gitlab." Link

• Villi: "Here we go. Congrats @gitlab." Link\

  ---

• Elastic: "We are excited to announce our intent to join forces with @OptimyzeCloud to help customers both observe and protect their data on one unified platform. Read more → https://go.es.io/2YNuz4F." Link

  ---

📊 $COSS - Public Markets

• $COSS markets up 5.93% last week

• Latest $COSS markets snapshot below as of market close last Friday courtesy of Koyfin.

This issue of COSS Weekly is brought to you by Mayfield Fund