Cloud Native StartupFest 2024
2024-03-19
Paris, France
as the organisers put it
Cloud Native StartupFest Europe has officially wrapped! Thank you to all the attendees who joined us. Watch keynotes and all breakout sessions on Cloud Native StartupFest’s YouTube channel.
who it's for
startup founders, open source maintainers, engineering managers, developer relations, venture capitalists, platform engineers, product managers, community managers
topics
open core business model; licensing tradeoffs and BSL; Cilium and eBPF adoption; WebAssembly serverless; WasmEdge runtime and plugins; open source monetization signals; go-to-market and repeatable sales; container image shrinking (SlimToolkit); remote dev environments on Kubernetes; foundation donation vs commercial licensing
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome + Opening Remarks | Kelsey Hightower | 02m |
Welcome covers why many CNCF projects become company foundations and names the hardest problems: licensing changes to protect business models, how to monetize… | ||
| Startup Lessons from 25 Years and Five Startups | Tim Enwall | 35m |
25 years and five startups yields concrete rules: one company sells to Gartner, one grows to $1.5B valuation (founder didn’t capture the upside), another built… | ||
| Panel: Venture Capital and Open Source, the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly | Kelsey Hightower, Aneel Lakhani, Megan Reynolds, Michael Yamnitsky | 46m |
Venture investors focus on concrete signals: having at least one paying customer validation and repeatable sales evidence, not GitHub vanity metrics—10,000… | ||
| Building an Open Core Business Model | Miley Fu, Michael Yuan | 20m |
Argues that open core is resurging because cloud-native and LLM economics force new tradeoffs, cites 4,000 fine-tuned models on a single Llama 2 fork as… | ||
| Isovalent: A Case Study in Open Source Startups | Stephen Augustus, Liz Rice | 32m |
Cisco is acquiring Isovalent while promising to leave Cilium and its eBPF community work intact; Isovalent traces eBPF to 2014 and Cilium to 2016, gains… | ||
| Fireside Chat | Kelsey Hightower, Alex Polvi | 26m |
Early startups begin as messy pivots and end with concrete products and exits here: an initial YC-backed company pivots four times and ships a control panel… | ||
| Licensing Tradeoffs in Open Source Startups | Nicholas Gottlieb | 25m |
Argues that permissive open source is no longer sustainable for cloud-first startups because hyperscalers can rehost projects and capture value, so many… | ||
| Is Your OSS Project Ready to Spin off Into a Company? | Arsh Sharma, Ramiro Berrelleza, Idit Levine, Madhuri Yechuri, Shauli Rozen | 33m |
Open source project becomes company when clear, repeatable business problems attract paying customers rather than just GitHub stars — example: 300 stars in two… | ||
| The Journey of Slim: From an Open Source Project That Almost Didn't Happen to a Startup and Beyond | Kyle Quest | 24m |
A container-focused tool originally built as a one-day hackathon prototype becomes docker-slim and later SlimToolkit / Slim AI, used to analyze, harden and… | ||
| Closing Remarks | Kelsey Hightower | 05m |
Interest rates rising force different choices: some startups need Venture capital to scale hardware but many succeed selling direct. GitHub stars do not equal… | ||
| nothing matches | ||