Tales of open source, bootstrapping and scaling from VivaTech

What is the value of being open source? Is bootstrapping for a while a fundamentally worthwhile part of building a business? What are the challenges when you’re working with cutting edge technology?

Last week, Milos Rusic, founder and CEO of DeepSet talked with his investor, Vidu Shanmugarajah, about those topics and more at VivaTech. You can watch the video (and I recommend that you do, since it was a very interesting talk), but I also thought I’d pull out some of the things I found most interesting here. They didn’t talk about open source quite as much as I wished they had, but it was a great conversation with plenty of other insights for entrepreneurs.

Open source for transparency

Transparency is a ‘value of open source’ that I’m seeing coming up more and more recently — and I think in an AI context it makes total sense. Rusic talked about how enterprises want/need to be able to see how things work for themselves, especially in sensitive models or use cases. This makes absolute sense in an AI context, especially if the AI models are being used for critical decisions.

The advantages of bootstrapping (and services)

Bootstrapping is hard, but staying small and running a services business at the beginning has its advantages, Rusic said — namely that you get a front row seat to the problem you intend to solve, as experienced by your potential customers. Rusic talked about how this allowed them to get a much better idea of what their product should look like eventually — and that knowing what product you want to build is really critical and not possible without that interaction with actual customers.

It also meant they weren’t trying to grow too fast, too soon. And by the time they were ready to pour on the gas, they were truly experts in the problem space.

On alignment

One of the challenges Rusic talked about was maintaining alignment as the team grows. At the beginning, he said, you talk to everyone and no one has to intentionally manage alignment. As the team grows, though, alignment is not longer automatic and has to be done with intentionality.

(Side note: better alignment is one of the many advantages of dialing in your positioning, either with someone like me to help or just by making sure you’ve got a written positioning canvas everyone is aligned around).

Scaling

Rusic had two interesting thoughts on scaling I wanted to pull out: First of all, that sometimes more people will not actually help you do more, and you need to hold off on scaling until you’re confident that more people will actually lead to more results. Second, that even if ‘processes’ aren’t cool, as you scale you need them.

Watch the video! There’s loads more I didn’t call out.