James Hawkins, PostHog

HOW TO: BUILD AN OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE STARTUP

“For open source companies, the pitch isn’t about revenues. You’ve got to build these huge projects, having a large group of developers writing codes for you for free because they just want to use these stuff.”
— James Hawkins

This week on CUTalks we are talking to James Hawkins, co-founder of PostHog, an open course product analytics software, which recently went through Y Combinator and has raised a $3M seed round. James shared some tips for budding entrepreneurs who might not have enough experience to start their own business yet. He also shed some light on the different business models of open source companies, taking examples from RedHat, MongoDB and Gitlab. He firmly believes that there seems to be a trend of open source software taking over SAAS system in recent years. He also explained how PostHog pitched their open source business models to various investors. Lastly he shared about their recent seed funding round with Y Combinator and the experience of working with the firm.

The podcast was produced by Carl Homer, Cambridge TV.

Jump to the following topics:

  1. Background - 1:00

  2. Becoming a holistic individual - 4:00

  3. Introduction to PostHog - 8:00

  4. Business model of open source software - 13:00

  5. Pitching open source business model to investor - 17:47

  6. On working with Y Combinator - 21:10

  7. Being remote first - 28:00

  8. Lessons from cycling - 30:20

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