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OCS 2020 Breakout: Matthew Gregory

Matthew Gregory is the founder and CEO of Ockam and has a passion for helping open source developers. Matthew has a diverse background from Azure Open Source, Heroku, he built the Weather API that your favorite weather app probably uses, and is a former America's Cup sailor.

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Matthew Gregory, Founder and CEO of Ockam, shares a detailed roadmap overview on how Ockam plans to build their platform to IPO on COSS

Introduction to Ockam and presentation - 0:00

Matthew’s background with maps and presentation context - 2:00

With so much survivorship bias in tech, Matthew is calling Ockam’s shot “while in the muck.” Presenting Ockam’s path from Zero to IPO - 3:40

Stage 1: Developer Awareness (Exploring methods + metrics) - 5:40

Stage 2: Building Open-Source Community (Exploring technical interfaces, user personas, indicators of usage, and time to technical-win) - 7:55

Stage 3: Self-Serve Saas (Going from users → customers. Commercial formula, dependent on commercial status of user and progress on technical win, plus packaging and pricing framework. Metrics around revenue, conversion, velocity.) - 13:07

Stage 4: Inside Sales (Cultivate and grow tactic. Objectives including (a) increasing MRR, and (b) to learn about customer acquisition costs on segment-by-segment basis prior to launching into enterprise sales phase. Challenge of moving from Inside Sales to Enterprise Sales. While executing on Inside Sales, doing research to spawn new company from within company for Enterprise Sales. Anti-metric: potential noise around Inside Sales data.) - 17:05

Stage 5: Enterprise Sales (Expensiveness of enterprise sales operations, and the risk involved. Large CAC and long sales cycles. The upside of well-tuned enterprise sales motion. Metrics, including (a) annual contract value, and (b) network effects from deployments.) - 22:22

Discussion of maps, projections, and explanations, for the upcoming section of presentation - 26:00

Building projection (layers of the company) - 26:55

Feedback projection (learnings from later stages informing previous stages) - 27:47

Virtuous cycle projection (flywheels of value creation, partnerships, sponsors, and value returning) - 28:44

Technology projection (high-performance teams) - 30:10

Product Roadmap projection (Content that Educates → Tools that Simplify → Services that Scale → Platforms that Unify) - 31:24

Concluding thoughts and helpful references (Peter Lavine’s 3 Pillars of Open Source. Next, Battery Ventures: “With bottoms-up offerings, it’s critical that your end users can create immediate value from your product without needing to speak to a sales person or pre-sales engineer.” Adam Gross’s model of 1,2,3, relevant to later stages of Self-Serve SaaS and Inside Sales. Bessemer Venture Partners perspective of open-source from an investor POV.) - 33:48

Concluding thoughts and places to connect with Ockam - 37:18


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