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OCS 2020 Fireside Chat: Gaurav Gupta and Tyler Hannan

Gaurav Gupta is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, focused on investing in enterprise software, including data-related technologies, cloud, observability and open source. Prior to joining Lightspeed, Gaurav was VP of Product at Elastic, where he led product management, product marketing, and developer relations. Prior to joining Elastic, Gaurav worked at Splunk as VP of Products, and was responsible for the overall user experience of the company's core enterprise product. At Splunk, he also led the creation of the company's first cloud offerings. Prior to Splunk, Gaurav worked in product and strategy roles at Google, Gateway, and the McKenna Group. He holds a BSE in Electrical Engineering from Princeton and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

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Tyler Hannan looks after the community team at Hasura and brings two decades of experience in databases, distributed systems, and developer advocacy.

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Learn the early secrets behind growing open-source communities from leaders at Elastic, Hasura, and more.

Introducing topic: Building and Growing Open-Source Developer Communities, as well as background for Gaurav - 00:00

Tyler gives background across disciplines and companies, rooted in telling the story of software — 1:50

Gaurav: How do you think about this whole space? — 3:20

Gaurav: I work with a lot of early-stage startups, maybe just open sourced something, starting to see some traction. How should someone at that stage think about building community? What should they be doing or prioritizing? - 5:57

Gaurav: It sounds like what you have to do these days is be more proactive. Is this an argument for establishing a DevRel role and having people dedicated to this early on? Is that something we’ll start to see more of and should see more of? - 9:50

Gaurav: What are some common measurements or KPIs that you’ve seen work in the early stages of a project? - 13:02

Gaurav: GitHub stars. VCs are obsessed with them, I’m a bit of a skeptic because I think they can be gamed. What’s your take? - 15:23

Gaurav: Interesting. So a Twitter follower or a Slack member has decided to engage, as opposed to someone just clicking ‘star.’ As an investor, I’ve looked into if you can actually collect telemetry data from real active usage of the product. That’s the gold. The other thing I’ve always thought about is, a lot of open-source projects are less developer-oriented, meaning the people that use the technology are not actually capable of contributing code. Is that right? How do you think about that, and does that invalidate the star metric? - 17:20

Gaurav: What are the tools you use as a head of community? What’s the best practice these days? - 20:40

Gaurav: What’s the biggest mistake you see people making when you think about community? For me, it’s companies that run content farms as a way of building community. They think it’s just about creating content and blog posts, and I feel there’s a lack of authenticity there. What’s yours? Do you agree with me? - 23:28


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