KubeCon Wrap Up
I spent most of last week at KubeCon EU in Paris, which rumor has it was the largest KubeCon yet. What were my takeaways?
Well, the first thing to come clean about is that I don’t usually go to a lot of talks at conferences — my priority is to use conferences to get face time with people I know. So this KubeCon post is not going to be like all the others…
I did go to a couple talks at the Cloud Native Startup Fest on the Tuesday before the real show began. In large part because I see Cloud Native Startup Fest as one of the competitors to Open Source Founders Summit; but also because I obviously work with startups, so I was curious what I would learn. The talks were good, and I admittedly did not see all of them, but my general thoughts were:
Even though it’s Cloud Native Startup Fest, there was an incredible focus on open source startups. Those of you who have known me for a long time know that I started in this industry by working with companies in the cloud native ecosystem but switched my focus to open source companies when I started working with companies on positioning. There is a huge overlap, but not all cloud native startups are open source, and not all open source startups are at the infrastructure layer. I’d actually like Cloud Native Startup Fest to focus on the specifics of selling/gtm/raising funds/marketing infrastructure tools, not open source companies. In other words, focus on the things that all cloud native startups have in common.
The other thing that struck me was that it was comparatively entry-level — none of the talks really seemed to be geared towards other founders, but rather towards people who were thinking about founding a company, or maybe who worked for a startup.
I don’t know if this was the case for previous editions of Cloud Native Startup Fest, but the hallway track was a huge fail. This might have been a venue issue; but way back in 2019 I went to one of the co-located events at KubeCon and it was in a separate venue that was appropriate for the size of the crowd, lunch was served on-site and there was an expectation that people showed up just for that event. The way the co-located events were set up in Paris, you bought access to all the co-located events, and then could pop in and out of them. As a result, you didn’t get a concentrated crowd of people interested in talking about cloud native startups over coffee.
Basically, I’m more convinced than ever that Open Source Founders Summit is necessary. It’s: a) all open source, only open source b) geared towards people who are already running open source companies, and c) networking and socializing is really prioritized. There’s no event like it out there.
What about the rest of KubeCon? It was good for my ego to have people stop me and say they listen to my podcast; it was also cool to see Mattermost’s booth that had the positioning we worked on together loud and clear. It was also amazing how many people that I know who were there.
There were people I had hoped to see who I didn’t, because there were just too many people to connect with everyone. Also, loads of people skipped town on Friday. I’ll probably plan on going to the next KubeCon in Europe, though, even though I had previously thought this would be my last.