Jeremiah Lowin - Open Source Crash Course

Principles & Lessons:

• Open source software creates reach and trust through transparency, not just free code access. As Jeremiah notes, “the critical thing about open source software is actually not that the source code is available, it's rather what that represents.” By exposing code, companies signal trust and foster community engagement, which—when cultivated well—compounds reach far more effectively than paid marketing. The point isn’t simply to distribute code freely, but to signal openness and attract users and contributors who deepen the product’s utility.
• The most successful open source businesses separate utility from risk mitigation and monetize the latter. Prefect gives away its core workflow engine but monetizes what Jeremiah calls “insurance”—a risk management layer that protects users from failure. This separation works because what customers value most in production is not the core logic itself, but guarantees around reliability, scale, and observability. The source code may be “free,” but trust, convenience, and risk reduction are not.
• Open source is an amplifier, not a differentiator; defensibility requires proprietary leverage on top. Both Jeremiah and Chetan stress that open source can rapidly grow adoption, but this doesn’t protect a company unless it builds capabilities beyond code. As Chetan notes, “the number of open source companies that have become very successful businesses as a percentage of total open source projects is very, very small.” To avoid commoditization by cloud providers or forks, firms must offer differentiated services (like managed infrastructure, APIs, or insight from operating at scale) that solve higher-order problems than the open code alone.
• Cloud infrastructure both expands and compresses opportunity for open source businesses. While the cloud lowers distribution barriers and supports usage at scale, it also enables hyperscalers (e.g., AWS) to compete directly with commercial open source projects by offering hosted versions. This forces startups to ask, as Jeremiah puts it, “Am I in the business of helping people run my code, or am I selling something else?” True defensibility in this landscape comes from aligning with, rather than competing against, the cloud’s economics—delivering services the cloud does not commoditize.
• Community is a strategic asset, but building it requires relentless human effort and empathy. Jeremiah emphasizes that building open source is not just coding; “it's about managing a community,” and he highlights a simple but revealing metric: the number of community support questions answered by people who don’t work at the company. Open source communities thrive when they are welcoming and generous; silence or toxicity degrades their compounding potential. Chetan notes the same is true at scale: Elastic’s 200+ meetups across 46 countries require constant investment and attention.
• Open source forces clarity on value creation because every artifact is publicly auditable. Jeremiah points out that “you can’t pretend your project has traction if no one stars your repo or joins your Slack.” The transparency inherent to open source creates a brutally honest mirror for product-market fit. Similarly, customers will eventually learn what they’re really paying for, which may not align with what they thought they were buying. That feedback loop demands constant self-audit of what is truly valuable and how that value is delivered.
• APIs represent the encapsulation of business logic, not just compute access. As Jeremiah notes, “an API call represents a way to bundle up what might otherwise be disparate, open source lines of code and turn them into business logic.” In this sense, APIs become the semantic layer between infrastructure and business outcome. Open source provides building blocks; APIs define usable endpoints that map to specific jobs to be done, making them a defensible interface between software systems and customer goals.
• Learning in public creates compound optionality and inbound gravity, even beyond software. Patrick draws a key insight from open source that generalizes across domains: if something is low-cost to produce and free to distribute, it should probably be shared. Chetan reinforces that sharing complex thinking or infrastructure—even when it feels risky—creates long-term advantage by attracting talent, feedback, and trust. The open source ethos is not just about software licensing; it's a philosophy of accelerating mutual learning to unlock hidden optionality in a broader ecosystem.

Transcript