[__sy__]

Early in the Seam journey, Dawn and I got a chance to speak with Jeff Lawson at Twilio. Jeff mentioned that exact dynamic, "the dev who's hacking on the weekend with Twilio and brings into work Monday morning" was a pretty powerful GTM force for them. But I don't think anyone would describe Twilio as open source. So being open-source doesn't appear to be a necessary condition for this dynamic to take place. What Jeff insisted on was the need for solid overlap between "i'm hacking with this API" and "i could use this for a business use case." That is, make the API product dead simple to get started with, and make sure it's easy to grasp how you could use this in a business context.

With respect to having an off-ramp by being open-source, I definitely agree that it does the psychological trick to convince a buyer. But in practically, most corporate-led open source projects are pretty hard to run end-to-end on your own infra. They also have limited outside contributors that really know how the stuff works.

With respect to Seam, I'd say being open-source wouldn't really move the needle for us in conversations with large enterprise customers. They're generally more interested in how much funding we have, how much runway that buys us, and how we're trending as far as building a sustainable business on which they will depend. Their tolerance for risk related to these questions is inversely proportional to their size. I suppose this is also why, in infrastructure sales, your next customer won't be significantly larger than the last one you closed.