How to decide what goes into project and product with Mike Schwartz of Gluu

The Business of Open Source

In this episode of The Business of Open Source, I talked with four-time entrepreneur Mike Schwartz, CEO and founder of Gluu as well as the host of Open Source Underdogs podcast, about his long career in entrepreneurship. Here’s some particularly interesting things to take out of this episode:

• “Beware an entrepreneur’s second company.” — Mike says his second company was a disaster because he tried to apply the lessons from the first company in the second, and often those lessons aren’t right for the new business
• Going all in on being a product company — the toughest year in Gluu’s history was when they decided to stop consulting and make it or break it as a product company
• Why it’s a good idea to look at the market analytically and start a company in a market you’ll be able to compete in without a huge number of features
• Why Gluu actually has more features in the open source version than the enterprise edition — because the open source distribution gets features that are in beta whereas the enterprise customers need a product that is 100% fully baked.
• Why Mike doesn’t believe in making the enterprise product more ‘scaleable’ — the open source project should be just as scaleable as the enterprise product

This episode was recorded on site at State of Open Con 24, outside in a media van!