Your competitors don't matter
When we started our first company, we were fresh out of MIT, where we’d all studied computer science. In short, we knew nothing about how to run a company. As a result, everything constantly felt like an emergency that had to be dealt with immediately, or the company would be doomed. Like most first-time founders, we didn’t yet have good intuition about the things that really mattered.
Our first startup was called Ksplice, and we had technology that could install software updates without rebooting. It was based on my cofounder’s MIT thesis work, and was basically pure magic. As soon as we started the company, we set out to get our technology merged into the Linux kernel. The thinking was: if we were the creators of the official “rebootless update” solution for Linux, it’d be a huge advantage for the company.
First, a quick detour into the inner workings of Linux. Linux is an open-source project, contributed to by tons of developers across the world—folks at big companies, hobbyists, and everything in between. They stay coordinated via a mailing list: the Linux Kernel Mailing List. When you have a feature you’d like to propose including in Linux, you send an email to the mailing list, and the community provides its feedback. So we did. You can actually see the original email here, with a subject line of “Ksplice: Rebootless kernel updates.”
