Today, we’re thrilled to share our v1.0 goals with Polar and announce our $1.8M pre-seed round to help us pursue our mission of expanding the open source economy.
Open source is the greatest lever ever for human innovation. Powering all of the products and services that we use and love on a daily basis. Accelerating our ability and velocity to build towards an even better future. Doing it all in the open to push the boundaries of our craft and make knowledge and opportunities accessible to all.
It’s magical. Yet, funding means to strengthen this lever is outdated: Causing unnecessary tension for all parties involved and holding the ecosystem back from its full potential.
It’s time to move beyond sponsorship & donations
These models standalone made sense last century when software emerged as a nascent industry built by passionate hobbyists for themselves and their peers. Since then, however, software has “eaten the world”. Dramatically increasing the adoption, usage and reliance on open source from individuals, startups to Fortune 500s.
As a result, questions, bug reports and feature requests are no longer rare and from curious peers. It’s now a constant stream creating an endless backlog of inbound issues. For maintainers, it quickly goes from a hobby to a stressful and unpaid side gig. Turning to sponsorship for support since it’s accessible, but getting little to no return. This dynamic of a growing workload with dwindling support is leading to initiatives being abandoned or worse, maintainer burnout.
In order to get meaningful capital, businesses need to invest. They won’t with the current model. Getting them – and most individuals too – to deploy capital at scale requires a narrative around additional and measurable value in return. Sponsorship offers neither: Emphasizing value given vs. ahead.
Yet, demand is clearly growing significantly for support, issues to be fixed and specific features to be built – all tangible, additional and measurable needs. The problem is we can’t leverage it with current models and workflows redirec
