Profiting From Free Software. The Sleepycat & Cloudera Stories – with Mike Olson

Mike Olson, Cloudera, Customer Acquisition, SaaS (software as a service), Scaling, Sell Your Business

“We got laughed out of the room of the venture capitalists we talked to,” Mike Olson told me when I asked him why he didn’t raise money for Sleepycat, his open-source embedded database company. “You’re going to make a living selling free [open source] software?” They said. “That ain’t going to work!”

This is the story of how he made it work, and earned “a wonderful profit” until he sold Sleepycat to Oracle in 2006.

It’s also the story of how he launched his current company, Cloudera, which contributes to and distributes Hadoop, the open source software that powers the data processing engines of the world’s largest and most popular web sites.

Mike Olson

Cloudera

Michael Olson is the CEO of Cloudera, which offers enterprises a powerful new data platform built on the popular Apache Hadoop open-source software package.

 

Three messages before we get started. First, who’s the lawyer that tech entrepreneurs trust? Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. Here’s what Neil Patel, founder of KISSmetrics, says about him. “Scott is a great lawyer. He is affordable, responds fast, doesn’t charge you for five minute phone calls, and always gives great advice.” Walker Corporate Law.

Are you still coordinating projects by e-mail and wondering why you’re not productive? Would you check out TeamworkPM.net? TeamworkPM.net is trusted by Universal Studios, the University of Texas at Austin, the U.S. Army, and other large organizations. But if you’re just trying to coordinate with a small company, maybe just two people, it will still help make your team more productive. How much more productive would you be if you used TeamworkPM.net?

Finally, do you know someone who wants to build an online store? Tell them that Shopify is the easiest way to build a...

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