COSS Weekly, Issue #52: October 24th, 2021
Here's the fifty-second 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).
This last week featured $136M in new funding announcements from Aiven, Parallel, and vFunction, mergers activity from New Relic and DeepMind, and the debut of the COSS NFTs in the run-up to Open Core Summit (Dec. 7th -9th, register free!)
Enjoy!
💰 COSS Funding: $136M
Aiven, combining the best open source technologies with cloud infrastructure, announced their $60M Series C extension at a $2B valuation led by World Innovation Lab and IVP. Link
Parallel, the NFT sci-fi card game, announced $50M Series A at $500M valuation led by Paradigm. Previous investors include OSS Capital, Chad Hurley, Ram Shriram, and Gabriel Leydon. Link
vFunction, makers of the platform for cloud native modernization, announced their $26M Series A led by Zeev Ventures. Link
📚 COSS Content
JJ: "Every open source project community is already a DAO." Link
Jorge Ferrer: "Last week was my last at Liferay after 15 great years. I feel immense gratitude for the experience and for contributing to the growth of a young startup to become one of the great Open Source companies. I've learned a lot during this time, here go some lessons I take with me." Link
David Sacks: "New blog post: The SaaS Metrics That Matter Here are the metrics that Craft analyzes for a SaaS investment. Plus we're open-sourcing our internal tool SaaSGrid to help you easily generate them." Link
JJ: "THRILLED to share this beautiful @dremio Series D celebration NFT from their Jan 2021 news. // @ApacheArrow @SapphireVC @TShiran @intjesus Register free for OCS 2021 to win this/many COSS NFTs memorializing the economic activity in COSS this year: https://2021.OpenCoreSummit.com." Link
Salil: "The cheaper it gets to build a startup, the more expensive it gets to invest in one." Link
^JJ's response: "Hence COSS" Link
Sam Bhagwat: "We always hear about how much of the web runs on WordPress. (42% now!) But I was curious. WordPress is growing. How much more will it grow? And how long will that take? My projection: WordPress will peak at 60%, around 2030. A journey into what numbers say about the web." Link
COSS Community: "Today, peek at @aiven_io's Series C NFT, commemorating their $100M March announcement! / @ApacheKafka @OskariSaarenmaa @HannuValtonen @hnousiainen Register free for OCS 2021 to win this/many COSS NFTs memorializing the economic activity in COSS this year: https://2021.OpenCoreSummit.com." Link
COSS Community: "... And @aiven_io 's $60M Series D NFT, from October 2021, featuring lead investors @wilabcom and @IVP! Register free for OCS 2021 for a chance to win special NFTs like these, memorializing this year's COSS milestones: https://2021.OpenCoreSummit.com." Link
JJ: "Awesome to see @cue_lang on first page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=289156" Link
Peer Richelsen: "thinking about using @gitcoin for the developer community. any thoughts?" Link
JJ: "To all VCs: invest in COSS more! The core of the startup is an open source project whereby you can: - read the code - ascertain engineering velocity - understand the community - do competitive diligence All without ever even talking with the founders" Link
Mitchell Hashimoto: "HashiCorp is mostly remote, but we do have around 5 to 10% of our employees in an office in SF (typically, not currently due to COVID) depending on org/team. I've actually never been to our new office (lol ) but it looks pretty nice! https://officesnapshots.com/2021/10/19/has." Link
Jason Lemkin: "So GitLab just hit a $15B market cap It's one that just ... always was growing at epic rates, from YC Demo Day to IPO It's growing a stunning 69% a year at $250,000,000+ in ARR 5 Interesting Learnings." Link
JJ: "Alibaba is open sourcing all their @risc_v chip designs! Open source is truly borderless and sanction-less." Link
Matt Mullenweg: "Probably the most comprehensive look at Automattic's business published so far. Worth a subscription to read." Link
Gabe Monroy: "I am honored and humbled to join @DigitalOcean as its Chief Product Officer. I am excited to lead the team to the next phase of product growth while supporting developers around the globe who rely on DigitalOcean to grow their businesses." Link
Software Freedom Conservancy: "We filed a lawsuit today against Vizio because they fail to fulfill even the basic requirements of the #GPL. You can check out the complete materials here: https://sfconservancy.org/vizio." Link
Sustain Open Source: "Today @MarkoSaric joins us from @PlausibleHQ to talk about OSS alternatives for analytics, and how to build a sustainable OSS product. Love it." Link
Runa Capital: "The top-10 fastest-growing open-source projects: Builder @builderio Earthly @earthlytech Fig @fig Jina AI @JinaAI_ OpenReplay @OpenReplayHQ Megaease @MegaEase Serverless Stack @ServerlessStack Modulz @Modulz Calendso @calendso Coqui @coqui_ai" Link
Jay Fry: "~100 million downloads of @HashiCorp products last year & ~12k contributors to the open source projects, says @davidmcj in #HashiConf opening keynote." Link
Peer Richelsen: "9th fastest OSS project AND we broke 1,000 members in Slack today" Link
MindsDB: "@MindsDB team had an exciting Q&A and inspirational conversation with Joseph Jacks about developing a successful business around #OpenSource technology. We're making it available for everyone to watch: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4W9D_o7E0is @COSS_Community @OpenCoreSummit @OSSCapital @asynchio." Link
JJ: "Here's the celebration NFT memorializing the SECOND COSS unicorn minted in 2021: @StarburstData, creators of @TrinoDB! $100M Series C led by @a16z. Register free for OCS 2021 to win this COSS NFT, enshrining the economic activity in COSS this year: https://2021.OpenCoreSummit.com." Link
Tim Sweeney: "Epic Games Store will welcome games that make use of blockchain tech provided they follow the relevant laws, disclose their terms, and are age-rated by an appropriate group. Though Epic's not using crypto in our games, we welcome innovation in the areas of technology and finance." Link
Stephen Cole: "If you're interested in contributing to Bitcoin Core, please consider doing so anonymously. Make protocol dev even more resilient to legal and social attacks." Link
Talks between Intel and chip designer SiFive have ended without a deal. SiFive will look to raise funds instead by Mark Gurman and Edward Ludlow. Link
Changelog: "@adamhjk on Chef's many failed open source business models: > In the end what we learned was that we could just never get the mix right and you couldn't win for losing. > No matter where I turned there was somebody who was mad at me." Link
Intel open-sources AI-powered tool to spot bugs in code by Kyle Wiggers. Link
Sentry: "To all the open source maintainers out there: we appreciate you. Thank you for all your work. #hacktoberfest." Link
Peer Richelsen: "on 1. March 2021, @BaileyPumfleet applied for Y Combinator with @calendso and was rejected four months after @beondeck invests with 8 more On Deck employees today, we're one of the fastest-growing COSS and On Deck is launching their very own accelerator." Link
Ajay Kulkarni: "Team @TimescaleDB does it again! A long (30+ min read), thorough comparison of @ClickHouseDB & @TimescaleDB for time-series data. Culmination of 3 mo of research & 100 hours of benchmarking TL;DR Which is better? Depends - do you need a car (versatile) or tractor (narrowly focused)?" Link
Peer Richelsen: "productivity has been insane. team has been merging 40 pull requests per week. that's 8 a day without weekends." Link
Nvidia releases robot toolbox to deepen support of robot operating system (ROS) by Gaurav Roy. Link
Red Hat continues to grow, but IBM struggles to continue by Ron Miller*.* Link
Matt Asay: "MongoDB's DockerHub image has been downloaded 40B+ times (https://hub.docker.com/_/mongo). Yes, this includes programmatic noise, but we also track 175M+ downloads from our site. Both = big jumps from when I was here 7 yrs ago. But the numbers I like best are https://mongodb.com/who-uses-mongo." Link
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Anaconda: "We're excited to announce our collaboration with @Microsoft! This will enable customers to confidently access our curated library of #OpenSource packages within Microsoft Cloud-hosted products and services without requiring a separate license.
Inside Microsoft's open source program office by Paul Sawers. Link
Kris Beevers: "Come scale up #NetBox at @NS1- incredible opportunity to take the reigns of a COSS business with massive upside while investing in a kickass OSS project+community to change the way networks are managed and operated! VP/GM of NetBox -." Link
Chris Dixon: "Open source began as a fringe political movement in the 80s and remained mostly a curiosity through the 90s, but started growing exponentially in the 2000s and after. Why? Because open source unlocked the power composability." Link
Tom Warren: "scoop: Microsoft has spent 10 years embracing open source software, and a controversial decision this week risks burning it all down. The .NET community isn't happy, and sources tell me engineers are angry inside Microsoft. Full story here: https://theverge.com/2021/10/22/227" Link
Adam Jacob: "Let's start a venture fund that exclusively backs open source products that commit to running the free software product/red hat model. I bet it works." Link
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mewnyfish: "The OpenGaming Era - open source code - tooling to setup your own servers - tooling to setup your own clients - composable and user owned save states - nfts for transferrable & composable assets - CC0 license - rules designed in the open - dev team(s) funded by a dao treasury." Link
💸 COSS Liquidity (M&A + IPOs)
DeepMind acquires the MuJuCo physics simulator, and plans to make the open-source simulation tool free for research everywhere. Link
New Relic acquires CodeStream, a leading developer collaboration platform, to build New Relic CodeStream --- an observability solution for developers. Link
📊 $COSS - Public Markets
$COSS markets up 2.78% 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
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