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Linen.dev (YC S20) - Founder Interview Highlights

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00:00 My name is Cam. I'm the founder of Linen. I went through Y Combinator in 2020, and we actually

00:05 started out with a different open source project. But the product we're working on now is called

00:11 Linen. It's an open source Slack alternative that's designed to be Google searchable and

00:17 discoverability. We generate a lot of organic SEO content. We can host it under your domain,

00:23 so everything is custom and branded. We're also working on custom single sign-on. We can host it under your domain, so everything is custom and branded. We're also working

00:27 on custom single sign-on. We have over 10 million

00:32 threads and messages that are being synced on Slack and Discord, where it's not.

00:36 It's proprietary. It's closed source. And I feel like if you're using open source tool

00:40 and you should use something for the job. So that was one reason

00:44 to open source.

00:48 The more practical aspect from a business standpoint,

00:55 open source allows you to give a lot of trust in the community,

01:01 trust in the code base, in people, like, seeing the project. You have trust in terms of privacy and security,

01:07 like seeing the project you have trust in terms of privacy and security and then uh trusting that like the code will still be here even if the company is gone from a competitive landscape

01:12 like you may need to make sure your license is like properly set up set up um because they're

01:18 when we were doing paper cups we had a few people straight up cloning our stuff and trying to resell

01:22 it um and you know some people might be okay with that,

01:26 but it also depends on kind of your motivations of it.

01:32 If you want to learn to build an open source company,

01:34 I think you kind of have to figure out the business model.

01:37 You have to figure out who you will eventually sell to.

01:41 You sell an enterprise version of it.

01:43 And then the other one is it's like a SaaS product. So you have

01:47 Sentry, it's kind of how Linen is operating. These

01:51 other tools that are open source, like Plausible, things like that

01:55 that are a SaaS product, essentially.

01:59 That happens to be open source. And do you think that represents

02:03 a new type of open source

02:06 project, something that is, you know, more recent?

02:10 How would you describe it?

02:10 Yeah, I do think when we were first starting PaperCops,

02:14 I think it was becoming more of a trend.

02:16 Then I think we were one of the, there were companies before,

02:20 but you see like emergence of that business model,

02:24 that open core business model.

02:26 I think like with the success of like GitLab and Mattermost,

02:30 those guys have a company and they kind of pioneered this like open core

02:34 business model.

02:35 The SaaS one is still a little bit different.

02:39 I think like companies like Cal.com,

02:41 they have more of a SaaS like business model.

02:43 How I have hired in past is

02:46 we typically do a contract and then based on how that goes we you know move forward the interviews

02:51 are just you know people might not be good at the code but they might still be really good at coding

02:56 so contracting tends to work better i agree makes total sense what's the best way for someone to

03:01 I agree. Makes total sense.

03:04 What's the best way for someone to get started today and contribute?

03:11 Yeah, I would look at, I would just start kind of looking into the code base,

03:12 and I would probably try to use it.

03:17 If you use it and have some feedback and have pull requests, that would be great.

03:18 That would be great.

03:20 And I'm sure people will check it out.

03:24 Well, thanks so much for sharing all this information.

03:28 And I do think a lot of this will benefit people who are building in the space. And so really appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

03:32 Yeah, definitely.

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