A Buyer's View of Open Source Companies with Mark Boost

This week on The Business of Open Source, I had a very different sort of guest — Mark Boost, the CEO and founder of Civo. We talked not only about Mark’s history as an entrepreneur, but also Civo’s recent acquisition of KubeFirst. This topic caught my eye because it’s not often I get an offer to talk with an acquirer of open source companies, and I wanted to take him up on it. (Though if you missed it, I also talked to Thomas di Giacomo about this topic, and it was fabulous). The that is different about this case is that Suse is fundamentally an open source company, but Civo is not, and this was the first time that Civo had acquired an open source company.

We talked about:

  • How the relationship started long before anyone was thinking about an acquisition

  • What the 1 + 1 = 3 equation looked like in this particular case

  • How it makes sense for an infrastructure company to acquire a complementary software company

  • What it means to hire a pre-revenue open source company

  • It’s a relatively new acquisition, so we did a pre-mortem on it together, and Mark talked about what could go wrong — a super interesting process.

  • Lastly, we talked about Civo’s open source projects and what business value the company gets out of it’s relationship with open source in general

Come join me at Open Source Founders Summit if you want more conversations about building open source companies!

Emily Omier