Comments on: Hacking Business Models

By: links for 2010-01-04 « Blarney Fellow

links for 2010-01-04 « Blarney Fellow — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 01:32:25 +0000

[...] Polymorph: Hacking Business Models (tags: startup hacking culture business) [...]

By: Salaries in a Virtual Company « Peter Zaitsev

Salaries in a Virtual Company « Peter Zaitsev — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 23:23:35 +0000

[...] approach which MySQL used when I worked there and which Zak and Monty propose in their Open Companies idea is to base salaries on the local market where employee [...]

By: Chris DiBona

Chris DiBona — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 20:21:05 +0000

So if you do the math:

.8 (20% time)
*
37.5 ( 75 hours per 2 weeks /2)
=
30 hours/week
* 1/12 (rough vacation)
=
27.5 hours/week.

Which isn’t a lot of time to dedicate to projects, honestly. You should look into how cygnus did things back in the day, they had a very interesting bonus/payments structure. In fact, I’ll email Gumby and point him at this.

Chris

By: Chris DiBona

Chris DiBona — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:08:38 +0000

Whuile I don’t think this is totally perfecto, have you considered exposing the vip level, salary and other items to all employees of the firm? It seems that if you are going to go for the gusto on changing how companies work, you should go all the way to full disclosure.

By: Timour Katchaounov

Timour Katchaounov — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 13:24:24 +0000

A lot of great ideas, however I wonder about these issues:
- I strongly disagree with making democratic decisions with respect to
technical issues. This will prevent innovation. With respect to innovation,
through the whole history of mankind the majority has been mostly wrong,
and the minority of brave innovators were right. Technical decisions should
be based on technical (both scientific and aesthetic) arguments, thus it
should be possible that one person has the strongest arguments, and the company
follows his/her suggestion.
- If we agree on a VIP (I really dislike the term), the VIP level should not
be related to the position in the company (e.g. developer, manager, etc).
It should be possible to remain “just a developer” and still be VIP,
and it should be possible that operational managers have lower VIP
than the people they manage. This will (partly) solve the issue with personal
growth inside the company. On the other hand people with leadership
positions must have a high VIP (e.g. architects).
- Have you considered how many customers (or what revenue) you would need in
order to allow for e.g. a team of 20-30 employees live well? When you look at
such numbers, Do you have product ideas that potentially can generate such
revenue? In my rough estimates, such a team can cost somewhere between
1.5M – 2.5M EUR. Do you have an idea how to make this much profit? (I don’t want
you to tell us the idea), just an honest answer if you believe it can be done.
- When considering salary levels in various countries, take into account that
the lower the standard of living in a country, the more expensive it is to
live in a similar comfort than in more organized countries with higher standard
of living. Therefore employees that live in “cheaper” places, should be payed
compared to the local standard much more than employees in richer countries
where the state takes care of many more things. If employees cannot afford to
live in equal comfort, they will naturally tend to emigrate (and thus possibly
leave the company).

By: My Home is My Office (by Sandro Groganz)

My Home is My Office (by Sandro Groganz) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:36:36 +0000

[...] and Zak formulated a set of principles and rules for running a Free Software/Open Source business. One rule they proclaim is: The Employee works in distributed company and may work from [...]

By: Polymorph: Conference Report: OpenMind & MindTrek 2007

Polymorph: Conference Report: OpenMind & MindTrek 2007 — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 20:01:02 +0000

[...] Monty, MySQL co-founder and excellent cook – we disussed more ideas about open business models and open operations models [...]

By: Embracing Open Sources » Launching a virtual company

Embracing Open Sources » Launching a virtual company — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 18:05:04 +0000

[...] MySQL’s internal model with eBox. Most of the things he said can be found in an entry of Zak’s blog (who was also at the event, by the way) but I would like to summarize the general [...]

By: Karim Ratib

Karim Ratib — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 20:46:24 +0000

Hey Zak,

Nice post. My company practices many of the principles you mention, so positive reinforcement is satisfying. There are a few other questions to be discussed for entrepreneurs wanting to take this route, including:

* What are software business models that are compatible with these principles? The two broad categories are services and products. The first is process-intensive and for large projects, customers usually require guarantees such as (gasp) CMMi or (double-gasp) PMP certification, which lead to a set of values that are not traditionally linked with openness. The second, product-based, approach requires investing in building a piece of technology and competing against established, probably proprietary-software vendors who are making higher margins selling licenses, leading to a high risk of early death. MySQL is obviously a success story in the second category, but how many of those can make it to sustainability?

* Should venture capital be sought? What would be the convincing value proposition in the face of competing business plans with similar ideas but simpler (read: to make money faster and more reliably) software and intellectual property models?

* What is the ethical behaviour when 2 or more FOSS-based software companies work in the same area, and provide similar services? What does coopetition practically mean?

We’ve been live for 3 years but we don’t have easy answers to those questions. In any case, it’s more fun than being a Microsoft Gold partner!

By: Peter Zaitsev

Peter Zaitsev — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:29:16 +0000

Very interesting…

A lot of Monty’s ideas seems to match the rules used for MySQL years ago… or the ones which Monty tried to use. It would be interesting to count how many are still used in the MySQL at this date.

The interesting challange is being small and efficient but at the same time being able to serve large markets, some of which may have difficulty dealing with small companies.

In my opinion these rules also mean the company should not go public (at least not to have significant portion of shares traded on stock exchange and held by institutional investors) as if it does contolling investors will care about their return rather than anything else.

I do not generally agree with cost of living thing. In my opinion the choice of country where you live is same choice as neighrboohood just on the larger scale. If american wants to move to china and get massive savings it should be his choice. Same other way around. Company may be only afford US level salaries for few positions – than so be it.

What should define salary is value person brings to the company, which can be geo based. For example consultant working in US and doing onsite jobs typically brings a lot of value due to his locality in this case salary should be adjusted.

I also think percentage numbers need to be adjusted in many cases but I simply treat these as samples
for many markets for example 5% whould not be enough to make any real Sales guy to work