Taking a hard look at what community means and if every OSS company needs one with Deepak Prabhakara

This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with BoxyHQ co-founder and CEO Deepak Prabhakara. We talked about a number of things, from BoxyHQ’s relationship with its open source project, called SAML Jackson to how to build a growth flywheel and how that flywheel does and does not depend on a community.

  • Is BoxyHQ a security company? Does it matter either way?

  • Starting the open source project at the same time as the company, and why they did it that way

  • The relationship between the user community and the customer community

  • BoxyHQ as the anti-platform — instead of trying to build a platform, which is the default goal for a lot of companies I speak with — they are explicitly trying to build a more a la carte experience for users

  • The challenges of community building around a project that isn’t sexy and how to build community that isn’t project-focused, but rather that’s focused around a problem space

  • Making the mistake of assuming your startup is completely unique and unlike any others!

We talked about much more as well, and it’s definitely an episode you should check out.

Emily Omier