Episode 66: Open Source Founders Summit 05f524, with Emily Omier, Founder

OSFS Website: https://05f5.com/

Intro

Michael: Hello and welcome to Open Source Underdogs! I’m your host Mike Schwartz, and this is a special episode to promote the inaugural Open Source Founder Summit, which is happening in Paris, May 27th and 28th.

Talking about this event is Emily Omier, host of The Business of Open Source Podcast, and along with Luxembourg Passbolt, is providing the initial activation energy to get this new institution of open-source entrepreneurial collaboration off the ground.

If you haven’t heard of Emily’s podcast, you should add the Business of Open Source to your favorites’ list right now. She’s recorded more than 200 episodes in the last 4 years. So, if you listen to all of them, I guarantee you’ll be much more prepared for your start-up journey.

Why Launch the Open Source Founders Summit?

Mike: Okay. Here’s the interview with Emily, so she can fill you in on the rest of the detail and why she’s interested in doing all this work to make this event happen. Emily, thank you so much for joining us on Open Source Underdogs today.

Emily: You’re welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Mike.

Mike: The reason I thought this would be a good idea is because I heard that you’re organizing a new conference. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about why you’re doing this?

Emily: Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So, the conference is called Open Source Founder Summit, and we can also have a long argument about semantics about whether it’s a conference, or a summit, or whatever it is.

A retreat, the rationale, or the motivation behind this event is several fold. I am a positioning consultant for open-source companies. I go to a lot of open-source conferences of all kinds, including actually a couple that are focused on business. And I always felt that there wasn’t any events that sort of represented the entire breadth of open-source businesses.

So, there was actually a specific conversation that I had with somebody before the Heavybit DevGuild’s conference focused on open source last May, and in this conversation, this other person was talking about how there’s no unicorn open-source companies in mainland Europe.

And I said, “Well, what about Odoo?”, which people don’t know about it is an open-source company that’s based in Belgium, that has 2000 employees around, and in fact, actually does have a $2-billion valuation. But anyway, this person I was talking to was like, “Oh, no, no, Odoo is a unicorn.” I actually didn’t have the numbers there with me, so I was like, “Okay, whatever. I’m not sure.” I didn’t argue back.

But it got me thinking about the fact that Odoo, which you may have noticed, is like one of my favorite open source-companies success stories – it’s totally left out of a lot of these conversations because a) they’re in Belgium, which is like fabulously uncool, it’s like as far away from the tech centers as possible. Maybe not quite, but it’s like, they’re in Europe, and they’re not even in Berlin or London – they’re in Belgium.

They’re not Dev tools, they make business applications, or like an open-source SAP, and so because they’re not Dev tools, they’re left out of a lot of the conversations about open source.

They didn’t go public, they did get some venture backing, but most of it was a while ago. They’re a profitable company. Basically, like they’re a company that I think most founders would consider a massive success, and yet, sort of