Success as an Open Source Founder

Excerpts from our interview with Frank Karlitschek, Founder and CEO of NextCloud

The Traits of a Founder

Making money means that you're selling something, and of course you need to sell something, but you don't necessarily need to sell software licenses.

It's interesting how everything's developed and done, how it works technically, but then also explain it to customers and try to convince them that it's something useful for them. 

Now the insight I have is that it all belongs together somehow. You cannot have one person who thinks about business and the other talks about technology and the third about marketing and the fourth about community. It's all disconnected, which just does not work. 

I'm not giving talks to give talks. I want to talk about something that I find interesting or that we are working on, to communicate and share. 

I'm not able to give talks about something that doesn't interest me. I really need to be passionate about the topic and then I give a talk. 

I always speak freely, I don't write down the sentences I'm going to say. I always like to just improvise, and this only works because I care about the topics.

One of my goals in life is to have a positive influence in the world. I want to do something good. And so I believe in giving a collaboration tool, like Nextcloud, to the world, which everybody can use.

To make sure that there is a free alternative to these big tech companies.

Open Source Technology

A lot of people have stereotypes about open source, who think that it is just some nerdy things which are not usable for normal people. Which is of course obviously wrong. 

From the UN perspective, it's very important that if some money goes into a developing country, that it goes there in a way that it helps everybody.

If all the software is open source, then it can be used by everybody and everybody can contribute and learn from it.

The Challenges in Building a Company

A lot of people had a lot of different opinions on what to sell and how this all should work, and this was the reason why, at the end, it was not successful. 

I always disliked that, because then open source was just used as a marketing tool. 

This was partly influenced by the investors who didn't really understand it. 

I also made some mistakes with picking my co-founders, to be honest, and this was also a reason why Owncloud was not successful.