Brian Douglas was “the Beyoncé of GitHub.” He jokingly crowned himself with that title during his years at that company, where he advocated for open source and a more inclusive community supporting it. His work there eventually led to his new startup, Open Sauced. Like the Queen Bey, Douglas’ mission is to empower a community. In his case, he’s seeking to support the open source community. With his former employer, GitHub, serving 4 million developers worldwide, the potential size of that audience is huge. In this episode of The Tech Founder Odyssey podcast, he shared why empowerment and breaking down barriers to make anyone “awesome” in open source was the motivation behind his startup journey.
Brian Douglas was “the Beyoncé of GitHub.” He jokingly crowned himself with that title during his years at that company, where he advocated for open source and a more inclusive community supporting it. His work there eventually led to his new startup, Open Sauced.
Like the Queen Bey, Douglas’ mission is to empower a community. In his case, he’s seeking to support the open source community. With his former employer, GitHub, serving 4 million developers worldwide, the potential size of that audience is huge.
In this episode of The Tech Founder Odyssey podcast, he shared why empowerment and breaking down barriers to make anyone “awesome” in open source was the motivation behind his startup journey.
Beyoncé “has a superfan group, the Beyhive, that will go to bat for her,” Douglas pointed out. “So if Beyoncé makes a country song, the Beyhive is there supporting her country song. If she starts doing the house music, which is her latest album, [they] are there to the point where like, you cannot say bad stuff about, he pointed out,. So what I’m focused on is having a strong community and having strong ties.”
Open Sauced, which launched in June, seeks to build open source intelligence platform to help companies to stay competitive. Its aim is to help give more potential open source contributors the information they need to get started with projects, and help maintain them over time
The conversation was co-hosted by Colleen Coll and Heather Joslyn of The New Stack.
Douglas’ introduction to tech started as a kid “cutting his teeth” on a Packard Bell and a shared computer at the community center inside his apartment complex, where he grew up outside of Tampa, Florida.
“I don't know what computer was in there, but it ran DOS,” he said. “And I got to play, like, Wolfenstein and eventually Duke Nukem and stuff like that. So that was my first sort of like, touch of a computer and I actually knew what I was doing.”
With his MBA in finance, the last recession in 2008 left only sales jobs available. But Douglas always knew he wanted to “build stuff.”
“I've always been like a copy and paste [person] and loved playing DOS games,” he told The New Stack. “I eventually [created] a pretty nice MySpace profile. then someone told me ‘Hey, you know, you could actually build apps now.’
“And post Web 2.0. people have frameworks and rails and Django. You just have to run a couple scripts, and you've got a web page live and put that in Heroku, or another server, and you're good. And that opened the world.”
Open Sauced began as a side project when he was director of developer advocacy at GitHub; He started working on the project full time in June, after about two years of tinkering with it.
Douglas didn’t grow up with money, he said, so moving from as an employee to the risky life of a CEO seeking funding prompted him to create his own comprehensive strategy. This included content creation (including a podcast, The Secret Sauce), other marketing, and shipping frontend code.
GitHub was very supportive of him spinning off Open Sauced as an independent startup, with colleagues assisting in refining his pitches to venture capital investors to raise funds.
“At GitHub, they have inside of their employee employment contract a moonlight clause,” Douglas said. Which means, he noted, because the company is powered by open source, “basically, whatever you work on, as long as you're not competing directly against GitHub, rebuilding it from the ground up, feel free to do whatever you need to do moonlight.”
Open Sauced will also continue Douglas’ efforts to increase representation of Blacks in tech and open pathways to level up their skills, similar to his work at GitHub with the Employee Resource Group (ERG) the Blacktocats.
“The focus there was to make sure that people had a home, like a community of belonging,” he said. “If you're a black employee at GitHub, you have a space and it was very helpful with things like 2020, during George Floyd. lt was the community [in which] we all supported each other during that situation.”
Douglas’ mission to rid the effects of imposter syndrome and champion anyone interested in open source makes him sound more like an open source ”whisperer”’ than a Beyoncé. Whatever the title, his iconic pizza brand — the company’s web address is “opensauced.pizza” — was his version, he said, of creating album cover art before forming the band.
His podcast’s tagline urges listeners to “stay saucy.” His plan for doing that at Open Sauced is to encourage new open source contributors.
“It's nice to know that projects can now opt in … but as a first-time contributor, where do I start? We can show you, ‘Hey, this project had five contributions, they're doing a great job. Why don't you start here?’
Alex Williams 0:00
Hey everyone. I'm here at the Open Source summit in Dublin, Ireland, and I have a little news for you. For the past several weeks, we've been talking to founders. As you will know, we're doing this tech founder Odyssey series. Well, now we have some new hosts, Colin Cole and Heather Joslin are taking the reins, and they will be doing the interviews. They have a great style very much down to earth interviews with people who are telling their stories about being founders. These are people who are engineers by background software developers, people who really have stories to tell about how they came to where they are today. So check it out the tech founder Odyssey series on the new stag bakers with Heather Jocelyn and Colin Cole.
You're listening to the new stack makers, a podcast made for people who develop, deploy and manage at scale software. For more conversations and articles, go to the new stack dot I O. All right now on with the show.
Colleen Coll 1:11
Hi, and welcome back to the new Stax latest podcast series, the tech founder Odyssey in which we speak with some of the most interesting tech startup creators and the cloud native industry. I'm calling call the new stack with co host Heather Jocelyn, Heather, how you doing Hey, hey calling. Today we have the pleasure to talk with Brian Douglas, founder and CEO of open sauce. Open sauce is an open source intelligence platform available for developers who have an interest in contributing to open source. And he founded it this year, we'll be asking Brian about the process of starting open sauce, and how his journey has unfolded. But to set the stage. Brian has a history of advocacy for open source and breaking its barriers and gates, so anyone can be awesome. And open source. His startup began as a side project when he was director of developer advocacy at GitHub. And he also lead developer relations and front end development teams at Netlify. Brian, welcome, and thanks for joining the conversation.
Brian Douglas 2:19
Thanks for having me, longtime reader of the new stack and happy to be on the podcast. That's awesome.
Colleen Coll 2:23
Now, tell us more about your roots in technology. I mean, what brought technology to you when you were a kid? What was your first computer?
Brian Douglas 2:32
Yeah, yeah, first computer man. I think I had a Packard Bell was like the thing I really cut my teeth on doing like Encarta like Windows 95. But honestly, like we had a community, like in my apartment complex, we had a community center. I don't know what computer was in there, but it ran dos. And so I got like, I got to touch a computer pretty early in life, and got to play like Wolfenstein and eventually do and Duke Nukem and stuff like that. So that that was my first sort of like, touch of a computer and actually knew what I was actually doing.
Colleen Coll 3:01
That's fantastic. But we noticed that in your Twitter feed be Dougie Wyo or is it be Dougie? Yo,
Brian Douglas 3:08
Dougie, yo.
Colleen Coll 3:11
Like that. You have you have the following tweet pin to your account, life update. I'm working on open source full time starting today dated June 10. This year, what was it like coming to a full stop with the being an employee to CEO?
Brian Douglas 3:24
Yeah, I mean, it was nerve racking. You know, Gabs, a great company to work for it's a great job I got to talk to like the, the most prominent engineers and in the space got to talk about like, talk to all the top open source project maintainer is about GitHub and what features were missing that to work on features like get up actions, code, spaces, co pilot was there for all those those features don't the launch, also was pre Microsoft acquisition. It was a very cushy job, like I had come from, like I mentioned, I went an apartment complex with didn't have a computer, we had a computer in the community center. So like I didn't grow up from money, or like I went to a safe state school that was driving distance to work from home. So to start my own thing, and like leave all that it was a big leap. But it's something that I have got a lot of conviction and open source is the reason why, like I have the job. It's a reason why even like learn how to code. It's because people are putting out stuff out there for other people to find blog posts, libraries on GitHub on NPM. And I want to bring more people on fold. Like that's, that's the ultimate goal is like make open source more approachable for everyone. Where did you grow up just outside of Tampa, Florida, and a small town called Palm Harbor. I say that because like every now and then I run some people like even out here like early Dropbox employee is from like the city over from where I grew up. And it's always fun to run in the people who know where I'm from. I just want
Heather Joslyn 4:46
to sort of backtrack a little bit so you're getting up you're trying to make open source more accessible. I mean, is that the core you feel like that is the core problem you're trying to solve and what what what frustrated you about that problem, then dri to it. Yeah. So
Brian Douglas 5:00
I mean, our mission is empowering the best developers to work at open source. And the reason for that is like I spent a lot of time trying to encourage folks underrepresented to contribute open source. So I GitHub, I had opportunity to run this program called floss and code. So free isn't libre, open source software, folks might know the acronym, maybe, maybe they it's new to them. But we did a hack day to teach HBCU students how to contribute to open source. And the way we did that is we had maintainers in in the room, showing them their projects, giving presentations, and then showing good versus us showing how to use the product, how to how to this cycle locally, run it on your machine, which is like the biggest hurdle for most people. It's like, I can use this thing. But I didn't know I could run the development version locally, find bugs and go fix them. And like my intro in the tech, like I had a finance degree to decimate last recession, ended up getting a sales job because finance was not hiring where people have no network. And that's what I had, I had no network and finance got the degree decided to go into sales did really well in sales. But I wanted to build stuff. I've always been like a copy and paste or would love doing DOS games, eventually gotten the MySpace built up a pretty nice MySpace profile if I if I could say, but yeah, so like, I my intro was like, someone told me, Hey, you know, you could actually build stuff, you could actually build apps now. And like post web 2.0. Like now people have frameworks and rails and Django, well, you just have to run a couple scripts, and you've got a web page live and put that in Heroku, or another server, and you're good. And that opened the world. To me, I was like, I had tons of ideas. Like I love the web, I love the internet. And I love building on it. And now I can build my own stuff. And I just want to bring more people in the fold. So like that was my ultimate goal is bring more people in the fold. But there definitely is an issue of like, not every repo is taking contributions. No one knows where to start. So I'm currently spending my time talking to maintainers, and companies on how to set their projects up for success. And also scale to engineering teams through open source either do hiring, or just having contribution or contracting
Colleen Coll 7:04
and being a finance. I know, it's often a struggle for founders in the beginning to seek funding and you have that background, what has it been like so far? And you're you're pretty new with this. So me being founded in June, and any advice seeking funding for aspiring entrepreneurs? And also notice that you have an MBA at Saint Leo, University of Florida? Do you think it's helped you as a CEO and give you business credit with potential funders? In short,
Brian Douglas 7:31
probably, no, it's a small school is also close driving distance in my house, like that's why I did it, my sales job paid for the MBA. So but I would say the skills I learned while getting an MBA has helped me tremendously in my career. So talking about I'll get to the funding thing in a second. But like my first startup, like second startup I worked at was Netlify. It was employee number three worked as an engineer. And because I had a business background, like in my interview, it was like very, it was like, we had coffee. And they were interviewing me and I didn't know what to interview. And then like, right in the interview, like, Oh, are you? What are you just meeting all your customers because I was a big customer of nella phi at that point. And I was a big free customer at that point, it was not paying for the product. But there is no actually raise funding, we're gonna want to hire you. And I was like, Oh, cool. So I ended up turning 36 930 6090 plan out for them, like off the top of my head, like the stuff you learn, going to business school, getting an MBA. So I spent a lot of time like developing strategy and like doing content creation and growing, doing marketing things, while also shipping front end code. And it's because I love doing it, I just that was my background, I just happen to be writing code now. And so I was able to get a lot of exposure at the startup scene to eventually get a job at GitHub, and then eventually start my own thing. So fundraising, like when you go into it, and like I didn't approach this, I bootstrapped the product, open source project for the past two years at GitHub at the point, it was like probably 300 users that were using it, we're now up to like 1000 at this point. And hopefully soon, it'll be way more now that we have like proper, a proper product around it. But what I'm getting at is like the fundraising, the way I approach it is like, I just asked a couple friends who I knew were at VCs or former colleagues at GitHub, and gave them a pitch. And it gave me very strong feedback of like, just not a great pitch. So I was able to like refine the pitch, and then actually figure out like, do I need to make take money do I need to continue to just Bootstrap and quit. And it just came down to I had a, I have a family, I still have a family. And it was I wasn't at a point where I can go, you know, work for $0 on a cool project and hope for money that come later. I'm a very conservative person when it comes to finances because I didn't have a lot growing up. So now that I have a bit more I do take a salary and that was able to raise through some angels and former GitHub employees to who believe in me and help support this.
Heather Joslyn 9:47
So you waited till you had the funding in place before you can just sort of leap into the unknown,
Brian Douglas 9:53
sort of Yeah, yeah. And that that tweet that you referred to earlier, Colleen was like that was a day where that was my last day like I had had secured funding had a bank account for the business and made the leap comfortably into moving into a smaller salary. But still taking a salary. What was
Heather Joslyn 10:09
good when you were working on this project at GitHub? Were they really supportive of it? Or did you sort of have to carve out time amongst other
Brian Douglas 10:18
things? Yeah. So I've always operated as a do first and ask for forgiveness later type of attitude. I learned how to code properly when I was 27 years old. So I already had a whole career, I had grown to basically senior IT consultant, which was like staff level salesperson, at a large company. And so like, I knew what I was doing. And I had like a fallback plan. It's like, they're like, oh, yeah, sorry, you can't work here anymore. So like my entire career, I've always carved out Fridays to be like, I heard the whole open source Friday thing. So Friday is Friday afternoon has always been like, I'm gonna do my own thing, I'm gonna go contribute open source, I'm gonna go read Stack Overflow, learn more about how to grow as a developer, it's definitely a privileged position to be in to be like, Hey, I've got a relationship with the people I'm working with. They know, I'm getting my work done Monday through Thursday, in half a Friday. Like I can give time to myself to learn educate myself, and I encourage everyone you should definitely have built into your week, learning is not even just open source. It's like go read a blog post, go read a book, like build that into your week. Because otherwise, if you're not learning, you're not growing. And like, eventually, you get stagnant. So at GitHub, they have inside of their employment contract is a moonlight class. So because GitHub is they're powered by open source, and a lot of open, the home of open source is GitHub. So for that reason, like they can't say, oh, everything you work on, we own that deal. Because like, if you do open source does GitHub own that and that, it's like a weird, so basically, whatever you work on, as long as you're not competing directly against GitHub, rebuilding GitHub, from the ground up, feel free to do whatever you need to do moonlight, have a whole nother business, I had a co worker who was a carpenter had an entire carpentry business, and would like like do renovations and stuff like that, in houses and a quite a few other good employees had like other things they did. So what I did, starting in 2020, like I'd work on open source pretty consistently, the entire time it worked there, but two years into the job, 2020 hit the guy, you know, I'm at home, guess I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try out streaming. So at stream like, wipe it right before the pandemic had started. Because we we got wind of COVID, the pandemic happening because we were traveling, and it was a lot of questions and like, we just assume things were gonna get shut down. So like, in January, end of January, I started streaming twice a week on open sauce in the open on Twitch. And the reason for that is because I didn't have a job where I was full time coding, I was writing sample example projects for actions and other things that GitHub, but I wasn't on our product team. So I wanted to build a product, I wanted to keep my skills, keep them up, and like know what was out there. So open source became that sort of platform for me to just keep learning and keep shipping code. So for two years, like I created authentication, and the app, and then grew a community and a discord and then eventually built features based on user feedback. So the original question like GitHub knew what I was doing, I would actually use open source as like a platform to talk about actions. So like, a lot of my DevOps and automation, like, it's all built in open sources, or so I built like a twitch bot. When you live stream on Twitch, the first thing you do sort of like building your lightsaber as a Jedi is the go to twitch bot and I built that hosted on Azure powered by GitHub actions. And it became my Microsoft build talk in 2020. And in 2021, so yeah, everyone would get up knew what I was working on. They knew I was a pizza person. I was coined the term Beyonce of GitHub for other reasons. But yeah. My role was like always, to have an example ready to go and open sauce became that example, this sort of repo to pull from
Colleen Coll 13:45
one of the roles at GitHub was I think it's labeled A erg. And we're assuming that the employee resource group is yes. Okay. And that involves your efforts to increase Representation of Black employees, also, while connecting black communities to opportunities and tech, how are you leveraging this for open source? Are you using the same strategy?
Brian Douglas 14:07
Yeah, that's a good question. Yeah. And I appreciate looking at my background, because I don't really get a lot of time to talk about my work with the black cats, which is, was the first employee resource group at GitHub. So GitHub growing like I joined when I was like, almost almost 600 people and the black cats was first ERG at that time, in 2017, they got started. And yeah, the focus there was like, we just wanted to make sure that people had a whole, like a community of belonging, if you're a black employee at GitHub, like you have a space to kind of, and it was very helpful things like 2020, during George Floyd like, it was the community that we all support each other during that situation. It was also I got to work on things like the master domain default. So I was I was part of that cohort strike team to like talk through like, how do we change default? How do we approach this? How do we follow what git did earlier that year? So when open sauce, it's always been trying to get people more in the fold. So attaching contributors contributions to repos. It's really easy when you already find an existing community. So like Black Girls Code, like go speak and attend and participate in that industry, or that that community and say, Hey, open sources a pathway to level up your skill. Actually, in the next week, I'll be speaking with Andela, which is a place for scaling talent from Africa. And teaching them and training them on open source and how to get first contributions and how to like approach, like in a way that's sustainable. So like, not spammy, but approach a maintainer and say, hey, I'm interested in participating, I'm joining this community, how do I get involved, like, that's all education that this needs to be out there. And I think a lot of times with the focus of open source being so much on like, just like the top maintainers, like, you just know who they are, whether it's Python, JavaScript dotnet, like you know who the people who speak at conferences all the time are, and there's room for new people to come up into the fold and hear new stories. And so an open sauce like we, though our approach right now is that we're indexing Git repos. So we would have to go in like the super details of it, but like we call it fetch, and then transform the data into a relational database. And then we provide insights on top of those repos, we can also based on the open and public get data can identify user IDs. And these user IDs might be like, you can find out the top 100, or the up and coming contributors in the industry based on language or framework. And that's where we're headed. So then we can attach, you can create an open source profile and have a rank or the sort of track record and resume attached to your contribution. And I do want to point out like, open source is not the only way to get a job. It's not a place that people are using heavily to get a job. But I'm just looking to provide more exposure, because at the end of the day, if you could show how skilled you are based on your contributions, and you can work at the public team that supports 10s of 1000s of companies that rely on this open source. Like that's a great thing to put on your resume and your cover letter, when you're
Colleen Coll 16:55
finding people to do these talks like you are coming up with the group in Africa. Do you find a lot of imposter syndrome? Because I was listening to one of your podcasts where that seems to be a thing. But it sounds like that you were more of a cheerleader or an advocate to almost like an open source whisper, if you will, to make sure that people are awesome on the internet and, and making open source you know, as as positive and just you know, for the community sake.
Brian Douglas 17:22
Yeah, I mean, it's the I guess I would call myself a whisper. I felt like I was sort of a I was like the champion of so many different people at GitHub. I definitely, like I joked about being the Beyonce of GitHub, like my job. And the reason for this, I did Devereaux CON talk about how to manage community at a scale of GitHub, like, at the moment, 84 million developers worldwide, like how do you even approach that? It's a great problem to have. But at the end of day, like Beyonce has a, she has a super fan group, which is called the Beyhive. And are the beehive and the beehive goes to bat for Beyonce. So they Beyonce makes a country song. Like the beehive is there supporting her country, if she starts doing the house music, which is her latest album, she has a lot of house songs like people are there and support and to the point where like, you cannot say bad stuff about Beyonce or the beehive will come out and support her. So like when she had her twins, everyone had had a comment about her body figure. And the beehive will come to bat for the for that individual for Beyonce. So like what I'm focused on is like we having strong community and having strong ties the community, whether it's Andela, or whether it's the Jas Foundation, like it gives us an end to find out like what are the needs to like the Jas Foundation, they have a lot of projects that have been around for a bit like jQuery that could use still use support because it's still maintained or still, like leverage in large corporations. So my pitch to them, which I didn't follow through on like whether this was connected, but like, they wanted to see more diversity in contribution inside of JavaScript projects. So my pitch to them was like when you do a polyfill, or you ship a new feature for JavaScript, why don't reach the Black Girls Code and be like, Hey, why don't you guys build something in the temporal library? Which is the date time library that came out last year? Why don't you build something based on this on this polyfill and then now you're in one, you educated on how JavaScript migrates features along the path. But to now you have experts who are literally people learning how to code now we're experts in cutting edge technology inside of JavaScript. In two years, that will be the norm. That's how you approach JavaScript. And now you have people that in two years now they're not only educated on cutting edge features, they're educated in JavaScript in a way and mentorship directly from the people creating the language. I
Heather Joslyn 19:36
have a question like the brand you mentioned, before we got on here you mentioned talked about the pizza being your being part of the brand. How did you sort of arrive at that at that establishing a brand or deciding on what what your brand is?
Brian Douglas 19:47
It's funny, it's like the age old thing like if you want to start a band, you create an album art first before even like, making music. Yeah, it's like I played music and highest Blood, stuff like that. And like we had dreams of being like bands and artists, and you spent way more time on your like your name, and the logos and stuff like that, I think same thing with code and open source as well. So long story short, that pizza became a TLD. In 2016, or 2015, I had this project I was, I was a CRM tool to track my open source contributions, it had no name. And I end up grabbing open SawStop pizza as like a fun gimmicky name. And then this, it attached itself to what I already had. So I have a ton of names for like quick side projects, like I've got the slate bot, which is like the bay bot. So Bay bot is my original Twitch app. It's an open source bot to teach you how to build Twitch bots. And then slave is the one I actually use. It's like the bay bot, but slaves legitimately slaves because it does a lot of cool things. Like when you start a repo animation show up and said thank you for the GitHub star. But yeah, so the brand pizza it is it is something that sticks. It's memorable. And it sounds like I get a lot of pushback on. So yeah, I like to join conversation like this. And like, Yeah, I'm the pizza guy. You might not remember my my name or my handle. But you do remember pizza?
Colleen Coll 21:05
Yeah, it was right there right place right beside the day.
Heather Joslyn 21:09
So so the founder, that would be founders out there. If you're collecting domain names, they will come in handy one day.
Brian Douglas 21:15
Yeah, I had to get rid of a quite a few of them, because I realized I probably won't ever use them. So if anyone wants mutual fund that I owe, it's it's now available.
Colleen Coll 21:26
That's good. But
Heather Joslyn 21:27
you did just starting in June as a full fledged company. Is anyone else working with you right now? And how do you? If so how do you get them? persuade them to join you?
Brian Douglas 21:36
Yeah, so I've got at this point five and a half people working with me. So I've got two other employees. So I convinced one of my friends who does YouTube content and marketing and operation project management, sort of like the jack of all trades, that's everything except coding, join me. And when I joined when I started full time in June, and they help run our YouTube series, which we interview, it's called the secret sauce, we interview open source maintainers, and founders about their strategy and open source. I've got another full time engineer, based out of Alabama, Brandon Roberts, who joined me earlier this month to take off some engineering and help spread some bandwidth. And then we've got two other folks who want his TED who's based out in Romania, he's been contributing to open source for a couple of years now. I had to bring him on, because he just he knows all the knowledge of the codebase. And like, yeah, we're doing a thing, please join. We have a designer down in Brazil, as well, who I also thought I found through Twitter through open source, and he's been helping drive some brands. And we have another person who is part time as well, helping out to scale some brand and design stuff to challenge
Heather Joslyn 22:36
for everybody where everyone working remotely. So many people still working remotely these days, and probably in some cases in some companies will be for forever. But how do you build a cohesive sort of staff culture in that situation?
Brian Douglas 22:49
You know, that's, that's a great question. And that's, that's something that I have. I've been early at startups. So a part of that that we're trying to do was, we weren't 100% remote. We had half the team was in person and Netlify. My previous employer before GitHub, like get up also was remote first and focus that was 100% remote team. Yeah, we basically have a standing meeting, like, it's very clear that having an all hands sort of like, Hey, here's like, here's what happened last week, here's the success. Here's what we failed that, like that became like a standing meeting. And it wasn't always like professional hoity toity here slides. And let's talk about metrics. It was more like, Hey, how's everyone doing? Let's just make sure we check in once a week. And then we have some standing meetings for like just engineering. So like, there's some things that were blocked on are some approaches that I thought was gonna be a good approach that turns out to be tech debt, two weeks into the product. Let's figure this out. Let's figure this out. So we're still trying like figuring this out. We want to do like sort of in person collaboration, like pick a city or everyone fly out. And then we have like a week of collaboration. Like those are things that really helped a lot of GitHub, because GitHub, there was part of one of their benefits is a call to many summits, where the entire team all flies to the same city, you have a week of planning and preparation, but also hanging out and getting those people because like when you're only in Slack, asynchronous communication or slack, you don't know tone, you don't know people's sense of humor, and it becomes an opportunity for people to like, rub each other the wrong way. But when you meet in person, you're like, oh, this person is actually a lot taller in person than I thought. Also the kind of funny.
Colleen Coll 24:20
It sounds like I mean, it sounds like it's a well oiled machine so far for I'm hearing. But have you had any setbacks or failures? Connect connected to the journey of starting open sauce?
Brian Douglas 24:34
Yeah, it's, I mean, it's a lot of like growing pains as you're sort of growing a team, like my original vision, it's like, don't grow the team too fast. I think a lot of times, startups are projects, they add more people than they can sort of manage. And I've seen this happen multiple times, and friends and other companies I've seen grow. So we've been very slow to add two new people to the team. Though I would love to have a bigger team. I'd love to have more engineers, so please reach out but yeah, we do like making sure sure that we hire the right people at the right time. Like, I definitely have people who aren't shipping code who are working with me today. And that's mainly because I do know how to write code. And I can fill in those gaps. But I also realize as I'm sort of driving vision and strategy, and like making sure issues are open and close, and milestones are made, that I can always be the one to, you know, fix that bug or ship the next feature. So I think only setbacks that we have is like trying to figure out okay, should we really focus on revenue, or should we focus on growth and adoption and community. And I think that's something that's also as an open source maintainer, as well. So wearing another hat, like trying to get sponsorship and stuff like that it's very similar to sort of raising revenue. Like what I saw at GitHub with GitHub sponsors, a lot of folks is like they found out, you can join GitHub sponsors, but you also have to talk about the project, and get it in front of people to actually get sponsorship. It's unfortunate because GitHub would love to do more exposure and explore and finding and link pointing dollars to specific projects. But then GitHub becomes like a place of like the kingmakers or the royalty divine inspiration to now these projects when these projects don't. So Git has been very hands off on that approach. But it's the same thing when I'm, like approaching open slots. Like I love joining podcasts like this. And I love like writing content and getting the story out in front of people. So that way, it feels more organic, and trying to do stuff. So I think sort of, we do have a runway, because we did take some funding from angels, we also have a path to revenue. So I think the only setbacks is like, okay, like only so many months of this thing that can work out until we basically have to say we're done. So we need to figure out how we can make the sustain itself,
Colleen Coll 26:37
I noticed that the pocket with a secret sauce podcast, and streaming is a major one, it seems like it's a big part of open source, will you continue with that strategy? Bring in any other employees or personalities to help with that? I mean, it seems like it's, it's your thing?
Brian Douglas 26:57
Yeah. I would say like the content creation thing is something I really, really leaned into during the pandemic's, I started streaming, I bought a camera at the stream. And then turns out that same camera you can create YouTube videos with so I leaned it that heavily I get up, get up my developer relations team, we took over the YouTube channel in a way that we could sustain and grow and share stories that we were doing at conferences. But the conference has stopped for like the six months into the pandemic. So we had to figure everything else out. So like, why don't we just bring people to us? Here's you, too. So when we started open sauce, my vision was like, before we started shipping the new code, because we have a new platform inside site, open sauce, that pizza, like we started working on that platform. But before we started, I wanted to validate the product and like go have conversations with people who would be users and contributors to this. So that's what the secret sauce became is like, Hey, what's this reach out to our potential customers and people who are doing good job in open source? Would they think open source would be valuable insight into what they're doing already. It's behind the scenes knowledge. Essentially, every time I have an interview with someone on the secret sauce, like we turn off the cameras, and I give them a demo, talk about their problems. So and I think the one thing about starting a startup is like you don't talk to customers enough if you just you never talk to customers enough. So if I can manufacture a situation where I can do something that can do with my eyes closed switch, have a conversation with somebody else who likes open source, then I can also be like, hey, while we're here, do you want to see a quick demo of a feature or you want to see some figma designs. So that becomes like our sort of our funnel to get more attention and conversation around what we're building to make sure we're building the right thing? So the answer your question, like we'll eventually invite other folks, I've had other engineers and stuff like that join me to chat about our products and stories about like, we had a series of Twitter spaces where we talked about Fang, and how Fang companies are ruining open source. It's a strong statement. But it was based on a newsletter that the pragmatic engineer put out. Eventually, Google engineers get distinguish. And they can't validate doing open source contributions anymore, because they have to solve business needs. And eventually the business needs separate from where open source is headed. That was the that was a summary of the conversation. What's next for your company? Yeah, that's a great question. At the time of this recording, we're a day away from hacktoberfest starting. So we we've shipped our initial platform, the insights platform to index all of Oktoberfest. The reason for that is I talked to DigitalOcean every year before they launch and help to make sure they're set up for success during the event. So that way, GitHub and DigitalOcean have a great month, because like if there's too much spam happening, like not only DigitalOcean has like a problem, GitHub, that's a problem. So what we're doing is we're finding out insights of like it will want to spam. So if anybody's spamming multiple projects, at least we can all know sort of like a block party, which is an app to find out people who are doing bad actors inside of social platforms, or DMS, at least we can all be on the same page. GitHub has spam features, if you mark them as a spammer. Everyone is notified internally at GitHub, and then they get marked internally to not interact with projects. Like that's something we need to educate more maintainers to be more vocal about, like Mark stuff as spam So that's what we're going to be encouraging but also encouraging where contributions happening. So it's nice to know that projects can now opt in, they'll have to profess, but as a first time contributor like where do I start? So if we can show you, hey, this project had five contributions, they're doing a great job, why don't you go start here? Join their discord, see how people are getting contributions, create a cohort, we were looking to partner with other folks like virtual coffee, to have cohorts of folks to have conversations about how to do open source. And then eventually we want to, we want to share the story and like develop a story of like, I'm doing open source, how do I how do I talk about it? Like, how do I share this? How do I add this to my resume? How do I present this to a prospective employer? Or how do I validate my current employer than I deserve a raise or I deserve more attention for the work I'm doing outside of work?
Colleen Coll 30:46
Well, I'm hearing you're having these events, virtual coffee, where's the pizza party? I mean?
Brian Douglas 30:53
Yeah, so we do have pizza parties. Last summer, before I went full time, we hosted these live streams, very similar to secret sauce. So pizza party is a basically an opportunity for the maintainers to show all of our viewers and community members how to use their project. Because I found that as a missing piece, like I find a cool project, but I don't know how to use it. There's no like the readme is missing. And the maintainer didn't have bandwidth, but they do have an hour to sit with me and be like, Hey, here's a quick demo of how to use this. Here's stuff that we here's some like good first issues, here's documentation that's missing. People are literally cloning and like trying to use it while we're on stream. And they're getting feedback and QA, like on the stream. So the pizza party that was like, basically, the structure, unfortunately, had to pause that because like, live streaming with guests takes a lot of time. So hoping to bring back the pizza parties in the future.
Colleen Coll 31:39
Please do and we're expecting our invites. Right, Heather. So we're basically winding down the interview. Uh, but before we go, I mean, I have to know this. What is your go to style pizza and topping? Go to
Brian Douglas 31:55
aisle and toppings? Okay, good. Yeah, so I'm gonna be holtrop specific. So I'm in Oakland, there's a pizza spot called Carbone? It's right next to the lake up in like the Grand Lake area. And people who are from the Bay Area, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about. But they do basically Detroit style pizza, which is like the pan. So stick for Kasha bread. They have a great mushroom and garlic pizza. My kids love it. I love it. My wife is she's okay with it. And it's a it's a chamber here at the Douglas household. So that's my go to.
Colleen Coll 32:28
Yeah, my next stop. I have to get that. Yeah. So Yeah, mine is Margarita. That's my go to elbow. What about you,
Heather Joslyn 32:35
um, basic pepperoni and mushroom. That's my that's my ideal.
Brian Douglas 32:40
It's a good staple.
Colleen Coll 32:40
You're really getting hungry right now. But I want to thank you all for joining us. On the episode of the new Stax podcast series, tech founders Odyssey. We've been talking with Brian Douglas, founder and CEO of open sauce, and how he created this company and what he's learned along the way. And I want to thank Heather, for CO hosting with me. Absolutely. Thanks. And thank you for joining us, Brian.
Brian Douglas 33:06
Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Stay saucy. Love it.
Colleen Coll 33:09
And as always, thank you for listening to the news tech, the tech founders Odyssey. See you next time.
Alex Williams 33:19
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Transcribed by https://otter.ai