CNCF-hosted Co-located Events North America 2024

Join tech industry veteran Kelsey Hightower and Vertex Ventures' Megan Reynolds for an insightful discussion on navigating the challenges of building resilient start-ups in today's economic climate. As we move away from the era of zero interest rate policies (ZIRP), entrepreneurs face new hurdles in funding, growth, and sustainability.
Kelsey and Megan will explore:

• Adapting business models for tighter capital markets
  
• Strategies for efficient growth and extending runway
  
• Building a culture of resilience and adaptability
  
• Opportunities emerging in the post-ZIRP landscape
  

This fireside chat offers valuable insights for founders, investors, and anyone interested in the evolving start-up ecosystem.

In the last 10 years since the first commit of Kubernetes, venture capital funding has supported thousands of cloud-native companies. These investments have enabled successful business models to emerge around open-source technologies and generated collective market value well over $10 billion. As we look ahead to the next 10 years, the opportunity to build companies in cloud-native AI (CNAI) presents an even larger opportunity. Join us for this session, which includes a group of Partners from GV (formerly Google Ventures), Felicis Ventures, Spark Capital, and Unusual Ventures, all who have spent years investing in cloud-native companies. They'll share lessons from the biggest cloud-native investment successes and failures over the last 10 years and the opportunities for new CNAI startups that they're most excited about.

Join Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker, as he charts the remarkable evolution of Docker from an open-source phenomenon to a successful enterprise-focused company. This presentation will cover:

• Docker's origins and its impact on the developer ecosystem
  
• Key challenges in transitioning from open source to a sustainable business model
  
• Strategies for balancing community engagement with commercial interests
  
• Lessons learned in pivoting towards enterprise customers
  
• Docker's current position in the market and future vision
  

Gain valuable insights into the complexities of building a business around open source technology and the strategic decisions that shaped Docker's transformation. This session is ideal for tech leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in the intersection of open source and commercial software.

Join Adam Jacobs, founder of System Initiative, as he explores an innovative approach to open source software (OSS) licensing and monetization. This session will dive into:

• The limitations of traditional OSS licensing models
• Introduction to Fair Source licensing and its principles
• Balancing open collaboration with sustainable commercialization
• Potential impacts on developer communities and business models
• Real-world applications and case studies of Fair Source in action

Learn how Fair Source licensing aims to create a middle ground between fully open and proprietary software, potentially reshaping the OSS landscape. This presentation is essential for developers, project maintainers, business leaders, and anyone interested in the future of open source sustainability.

Join Jesse Suen and Hong Wang, co-founders of Akuity, as they share their journey of transforming ArgoCD from an internal Intuit project to a thriving independent open-source software (OSS) business. This session will cover:

• The origins of ArgoCD within Intuit and its evolution
  
• Challenges and opportunities in spinning out an enterprise-born OSS project
  
• Building a sustainable business model around ArgoCD
  
• Maintaining community engagement while pursuing commercial growth
  
• Key lessons learned during the transition to independence
  

Gain valuable insights into the complexities of OSS commercialization, corporate spin-outs, and building a startup around a popular open-source tool. This presentation is ideal for developers, OSS maintainers, entrepreneurs, and corporate innovation leaders interested in the intersection of open source and business strategy.

The CNCF hosts a wide variety of open source projects, not just in functionality but in the nature of the maintainers and funders behind the project. Some projects are backed by multiple large companies, including public companies with trillion-dollar market caps. Some are backed by single small startups with a small fraction of the resources. And some projects fall somewhere in between. But all share one fact: the vast majority of contributions are done by paid maintainers.
For startups in the CNCF ecosystem, is it possible to be successful delivering a CNCF open source project? Or is this strategy a fundamentally un-monetizable one? And from the perspective of the cloud native community, is it actually important for startups to be successful in this community? Or should the CNCF primarily focus on projects that are more like Kubernetes itself—backed by well-established companies with the resources and longevity to keep their projects afloat indefinitely?
Join this panel to hear from startup founders, project maintainers, and others in the thick of the struggle between commercialization and open source, between paying maintainers and appealing to the open source.