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OCS 2020 Keynote: Lonne Jaffe

Lonne Jaffe is a managing director at Insight Partners, where he focuses on deep tech and open source software. He was previously the CEO of Insight portfolio company Syncsort, which he joined in 2013 after serving as the senior vice president for corporate strategy at CA Technologies. Prior to CA, Lonne spent over a decade at IBM, where he led a number of sizable software acquisitions and held various technology strategy and operating executive roles.

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Insight Partners Managing Director Lonne Jaffe introduces the firms ScaleUp investing focus, COSS "neobundling", open source ecosystem dynamics and more!

Lonne's introduction, journey to Insight, and ScaleUp focus β€” 00:15

The compounding benefits of a razor focus on software β€” 2:55

Seeing COSS as a bundle of subcomponents, and its potential in creating open standards, harnessing distributed brainpower, removing vendor anxiety, simplifying adoption, and providing transparency. β€” 5:25

How have you reached investment decisions for COSS companies? β€” 11:47

Lonne shares stories of COSS companies in the Insight portfolio, including Aqua Security and Armory, and related learnings. - 14:39

How do you advise ScaleUp companies on benefitting from the open-source ecosystem, and acquiring small, but strategic, open-source projects and teams? β€” 18:40

How growth stage companies undervalue M&A, related to the emergence of "neobundling" (desire for nicely linked products and service offering) - 21:15

How microservices, decentralized architecture, and APIs make it easier to elegantly integrate acquisitions - 22:53

β€œCulture is another aspect of it. You need to be at a certain scale to do acquisitions and not have it be a distraction to the culture you’re trying to create.”

Startups are mispercieved to be unacquirable. Lonne describes the conditions under which promising startups can be willing to merge, without exiting - 23:35

What counterintuitive things have you struggled with in the COSS category? Lonne describes difficulties with diligencing the governance of open-source projects. β€” 26:15

What’s most exciting to you in the world that COSS has prime opportunity to disrupt or innovate around? Lonne discusses possibilities in the application layer and application environments, helped by the "machine learning-ification" of categories β€” 28:20


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