Jonathan Ellis is the Co-Founder and CTO of DataStax.
Who is a founder? Who is an investor? What things do you do? Jonathan asks the audience - 0:16
Jonathan introduces presentation — building an open company as a distributed team. - 1:05
Jonathan introduces his background with Datastax and Apache Cassandra - 1:20
Jonathan talks about the foundation route and gives some advice, including that foundations slow you down - 2:05
Open core versus freemium product — 2:46
The more open you are when building your project, the more successful your community will be. Bugs, code review, discussions (both users and developer discussions). - 4:00
Beyond visibility, allowing people to participate - 6:20
Leveling the playing field and community participation. Can't have your team in an office, if they're in an office together, and have the community as part of it as well. Need to have team distributed like community is. - 8:06
Prefer text to audio/video. Searchable, skimmable. - 9:09
Optimize for asynchronous. - 10:50
Need to have someone on team on a mission to respond to pull requests, issues, and comments quickly - 12:47
Jonathan discusses the war on Work from Home - 15:20
Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule - 16:45
Async standup - 17:35
How to use Slack better - 19:25
Things that teams who are new to a distributed organization struggle with and need to acclimate to - 21:48
Be aware of the Bus Factor - 23:40
Summary - 24:45
Audience question: It's hard to balance on a small team between fixing things and nurturing the community and addressing feedback. How can you balance that? - 25:44
Audience question: In my company, we have a private Discord for company and a public Discord for community. When we have technical discussions between engineers, should that be in private or public Discord? - 29:07
Audience question: I like at community in Slack like a river. Conversations come and go. We could store discussions from Slack and make it public. What do you think about that? - 31:15
Audience question: What do you think about bouncing off ideas, live conversations among founders, in comparison to async communication especially at the early stage of a project? - 33:49
Audience question: Do founders need to be in sync and on the same page (e.g. not disagreeing with each other in public)? - 35:05
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