How to save your company with a license change with Tyler Jewell
This week on The Business of Open Source, I spoke with Tyler Jewell — for the second time, now. Last time I spoke with Tyler, he was an investor at Dell Technologies Capital , he’s since taken over as CEO of Lightbend.
We talked about a lot, but there was a definite theme to our conversation: License changes. Lightbend had been running an open core model, with the open core using a permissive Apache license. The company’s open source project, Akka, is massively popular. Lightben had about $13 million in ARR. But it was spending over $20 million per year, mostly of on R&D and then GTM. And they had a churn problem; and the churn problem was that customers would stop buying Lightbend’s product, but they would stay with Akka, because it was good enough.
Why did this happen? The added proprietary features weren’t valuable enough for companies to pay for, especially in the face of budget cuts. And because the community was quite mature, it often started to duplicate these capabilities. And then the company faced a near-death experience in 2021. At the same time, usage of Akka was only growing, while the company was facing potential bankruptcy. Investors saw the potential and didn’t want to give up on the company, but it was clear to the board of directors that something needed to change — and that the thing that wasn’t working was the business model.
