Author: Alexis

In this episode, I had the pleasure to talk with Radhika Dutt, author of Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter.

Radhika has lived the full spectrum: engineering, startups, big organizations, and years of learning the hard way. What makes her work so compelling is how clearly she names the patterns many teams fall into, and how practical her framework is for escaping them.

From product diseases to a new mindset

Radhika starts with a story from her first startup, where the team caught what she calls Hero Syndrome. Their ambition was real, but their vision was vague: “revolutionize wireless.” It sounded exciting, but it did not tell anyone whose world they were changing, what problem they were solving, or what “success” would look like.

Over time, she kept seeing similar patterns across organizations: teams moving fast, doing a lot, and still feeling stuck. In 2017, she asked a simple question:

Are we all doomed to learning product leadership through trial and error, or can we build products systematically and avoid these predictable traps?

That question became Radical Product Thinking.

Beyond “fail fast”: vision driven, hypothesis driven

Radhika challenges a common Silicon Valley assumption: that the best way to build products is endless iteration and pivoting.

Iteration can hide a painful truth. Most teams can only afford a small number of pivots before they run out of money or momentum. When teams keep trying random directions, they lose the sense that they are learning. The work becomes demoralizing.

Radhika links this iteration led mentality to the venture capital model: fail fast, learn fast, move on. That model can produce unicorns, but it is not proof that it is the best way to build products. Survivor bias is not a method.

Her alternative is not “don’t iterate.” It is: build with clarity. Define the change you want. Make hypotheses. Plan actions. Measure whether it works. Learn in a way that preserves momentum.

The Radical Product Thinking framework in five parts

Radhika describes five components that work together:

1. Product vision
2. Strategy
3. Prioritization
4. Hypothesis driven execution and measurement
5. Culture

It is a full system. Not a workshop artifact you file away.

1) Product vision that is specific, not vague

A powerful moment in the conversation is when Radhika reframes vision.

A “good vision” is often taught as broad and grand: disrupt an industry, revolutionize a technology.

In Radical Product Thinking, a good vision is detailed. It answers:

• Who are you trying to help
• What problem do they have and what do they do today
• Why is the status quo unacceptable
• When will you know you have arrived
• How will you bring that end state to life

This level of clarity changes everything. It makes alignment possible. It gives teams a real target.

2) Strategy grounded in real pain points

Radhika then introduces a mnemonic for strategy: RDCL, like “radical.”

• R: Real pain point
• D: Design of the solution
• C: Capabilities required underneath
• L: Logistics: delivery, business model, training, partners, operations

This last part, logistics, is often skipped. Many teams act as if the business model can be bolted on later. Radhika insists it must be part of the strategy from the start.

A crucial detail: a pain point is real only if it is validated, meaning verified plus valued.

Verified: you observed it.
Valued: people are willing to give something up for it to be solved.

3) Prioritization as leadership at scale

This is one of my favorite parts.

Radhika reframes leadership: it is not telling people the top three priorities. It is enabling people to make good tradeoffs when you are not in the room.

Prioritization becomes a way to scale your intuition.

Her tool is a simple but powerful map:

• Y axis: vision fit
• X axis: survival fit

This creates four quadrants:

• good for vision and survival
• investing in the vision
• taking on vision debt
• neither

A key idea is naming vision debt when you take it on. Saying it out loud protects trust. It signals that you are not abandoning the vision. You are making a conscious tradeoff.

Radhika also highlights the usefulness of a survival statement: what does “survival” mean right now for this product? Cash, stakeholder support, time, credibility. Make it explicit, so decisions become less political and more objective.

4) Execution and measurement without gaming the system

Radhika makes a thoughtful critique of how OKRs are often used.

The goal of execution and measurement is to test whether strategy is working. That requires hypotheses and metrics tied to the assumptions inside your strategy.

When measurement becomes an exam, people optimize for looking good. That invites sandbagging and metric manipulation. Radhika advocates for a more collaborative approach: measure to learn, not to prove.

5) Culture: purpose, autonomy, psychological safety

Radhika defines culture through the conditions needed for innovation:

• shared purpose
• autonomy
• psychological safety

Purpose and autonomy are reinforced by earlier parts of the framework. Psychological safety is about reducing politics and creating conditions for meaningful work.

Her culture lens is very usable: two dimensions

• fulfilling vs non fulfilling
• urgent vs non urgent

The goal is to maximize the quadrant of fulfilling, non urgent work and minimize the other three:

• fulfilling but urgent: heroism
• not fulfilling but urgent: organizational cactus
• not fulfilling, not urgent: the soul sucking quadrant

Then she delivers a beautiful shift:

Your organization itself can be treated as a product that serves employees.
You can define pain points, craft strategies, test hypotheses, measure improvements, and refine culture over time.

A mindset shift that changes the conversation

What I took from this episode is not just a framework. It is a shift in how you lead:

• from iteration without direction to vision with hypotheses
• from top down prioritization to tradeoffs people can make themselves
• from measuring to judge to measuring to learn
• from “culture happens” to culture as something you can design and improve

If you care about building products that matter, and building teams that can sustain innovation, this conversation will give you both language and tools.

If you’re interested in learning more about Radical Product Thinking, you can find her book in bookstores or visit her blog at radicalproduct.com. Join us for our next episode as we continue exploring the fascinating intersection of leadership, innovation, and the future of work. Until then, keep leading the change.

Transcript

00:00.00

Alexis Monville

Welcome to the podcast on emerging leadership. I’m Alexis Monville. Today we are thrilled to have with us Radhika Dutt. Radhika is an innovation and program product management expert. She is the author of the book “Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter”. Radhika has worked globally across diverse sectors, from startups to giants. Welcome, Radhika.

00:21.93

Radhika Dutt

Thank you. Thank you for having me and I’m so excited to be here with you today.

00:25.86

Alexis Monville

Thank you, Radhika. Could you please introduce yourself to our audience and share a bit about your background and the work you do.

00:35.45

Radhika Dutt

Sure, so my background is that I started out as an engineer. I studied engineering at MIT and I became an entrepreneur soon after. My first startup was called Lobby 7 and we started this with a group of co-founders. There were five of us in total and we started it while we were still in our dorms at MIT. My whole experience has been through entrepreneurship and then working at larger companies and making mistakes along the way. For example, my first startup Lobby 7 was where we caught the “Hero Syndrome”. What I mean by that is our tagline and vision statement was to “revolutionize wireless” and our tagline was “enlightened wireless”. If you ask me now what does that mean, what did you mean by “revolutionizing wireless”, I’m really not sure. All we knew was we wanted to be big. That was all that mattered and that is “Hero Syndrome”. So that was the first “product disease” I caught and along the way there were other product diseases that we caught.

01:48.68

Alexis Monville

Um.

01:59.93

Radhika Dutt

I’ve worked in different organizations and kept seeing product diseases. Over time, as I learned from these product diseases and learned to do better, I then watched other people make these mistakes and had to watch them suffer through it. The burning question for me in 2017, after almost twenty years of experience, was: Is it that we’re all doomed to learning from trial and error or is there a way we can learn to build products systematically so that we can avoid these product diseases? That’s how “Radical Product Thinking” was born.

02:37.48

Alexis Monville

Wow, excellent. I’m glad you’re touching on the product diseases, that’s really something that is interesting. In “Radical Product Thinking”, you’re describing the approach, but you really start to say it’s really a mindset change. I believe there’s an exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland that is inspiring that and making it easier to understand. Can you tell me more about that mindset change?

03:12.24

Radhika Dutt

Yes, so the mindset change we need is moving away from the belief that the best way to build products is through iteration. This Silicon Valley mentality of trying different things and putting them on the market to see what works has led us to continually pivot and iterate until we find something that works. However, this mindset disguises the fact that a team can typically only afford 2 to 3 pivots before they run out of money or momentum. Teams lose momentum as they begin to feel they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re just trying different things, and it can become demoralizing when they don’t feel they’re making progress.

03:50.30

Alexis Monville

Go on.

04:06.38

Radhika Dutt

Teams need to feel they’ve learned something and have a clear next step. This iteration-led mindset needs to change. We need to become more vision-driven. We need more clarity on the problem we’re solving, our set of hypotheses, our planned actions, and how we will test if it’s working. We need a more systematic approach. It sounds obvious, but then one might wonder how we ended up with this iteration-led mentality. The answer is that it’s baked into the venture capital (VC) business model.

Venture capitalists invest in multiple startups, needing only one to succeed big for a return on investment. In fact, they want startups to fail fast so they’re not continually investing in something that’s not going anywhere. This “fail fast, learn fast” mentality originated from the VC model.

05:23.17

Alexis Monville

Yes?

05:37.14

Radhika Dutt

While this VC model has led to some unicorns, it doesn’t mean it’s the best way to build products. It’s more survivor bias than a proven method. Entrepreneurs need to realize that world-changing products often come from a more systematic and deliberate approach.

06:06.21

Alexis Monville

So what would be the pillars of the Radical Product Thinking philosophy when looking at this?

06:14.91

Radhika Dutt

The first pillar is seeing your product as a mechanism for creating the change you want. Until now, we’ve thought about a product as a physical or digital thing and its success as the end goal. We need to start with clarity on the change we want to bring about before we build the product.

The second pillar is that your product is only successful if it creates that change.

The third pillar is the idea that you can build your product systematically. In other words, you can engineer the change you want to bring about by starting with a clear vision of the end state. This vision then translates into strategy, priorities, hypothesis-driven execution and measurement, and culture. These five elements – vision, strategy, prioritization, hypothesis-driven execution and measurement, and culture – make up the Radical Product Thinking framework.

07:50.41

Radhika Dutt

This step-by-step framework allows you to create visionary products systematically.

07:56.59

Alexis Monville

To clarify, could you tell us more about the first element of the framework – product vision? When I hear “vision,” I’m tempted to think of grand visions and ambitions that aren’t really grounded in reality, but I believe that’s not what you’re referring to.

08:17.91

Radhika Dutt

Exactly. We have to discard much of what we’ve learned about what constitutes a good vision. We’ve been taught that a good vision is broad, such as revolutionizing wireless or disrupting a particular industry. But in the Radical Product Thinking approach, a good vision is detailed and answers the who, what, why, when, and how questions.

By this, I mean: whose world are you trying to change, and it’s not everyone’s world. What exactly is the problem and what’s the solution they’re using today? Why is the status quo unacceptable? When will we know that we’ve arrived, or in other words, what does the end state look like when this problem is solved? And finally, how are we going to bring this about with our product?

Let me give an example to make it clear. The Radical Product Thinking format gives you a fill-in-the-blank statement to help you answer these questions. Here’s an example of a vision statement for a startup I had many years ago:

“Today, when amateur wine drinkers want to find wines that they’re likely to enjoy, they have to pick attractive-looking wine bottles at the wine store or try wines that are on sale. This is unacceptable because it’s hard to learn about wines this way and leads to many disappointments. We envision a world where finding wines you like is as easy as finding movies you like on Netflix. We’re bringing about this world through a recommendations algorithm that matches wines to your taste palette and an operational setup that delivers these wines to your table.”

11:07.18

Alexis Monville

That’s a product vision. It’s not grand, but it’s very clear about the problem and the change it will create for wine enthusiasts.

11:27.86

Radhika Dutt

Exactly. This vision isn’t about changing the world for everyone. It can be for a very specific group of people. The clarity it brings is such that even if I hadn’t told you anything about my startup, by the end of the vision statement, you knew exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it.

11:49.55

Alexis Monville

Absolutely. So next up in the framework is strategy. Could you tell us a bit more about that?

12:00.23

Radhika Dutt

Yes, let’s discuss the problems we face today with strategy. Most company strategies I see usually read something like this: “We’re going to build XYZ in terms of a feature set or products. This will require an investment of X million, and we’re planning to launch it in these markets. The expected return will be such and such.” This type of strategy is quite vague, I’d say. So, what does a good product strategy look like instead? The mnemonic is RDCL, standing for Radical, where we ground it in the real pain points. The word ‘real’ is emphasized because we want to distinguish it from the imaginary pain points.

Firstly, we must ask the question, “What makes someone come to the product?” This question then leads to the ‘D’ in RDCL, which stands for Design. What is our solution to the pain that brings people to the product?

The ‘C’ stands for Capabilities. This involves asking, “What’s the underlying engine that powers this solution?”

Finally, ‘L’ stands for Logistics. This involves asking, “What is the business model? How are we going to support this product? What training is required?” All these questions about how we will deliver the solution to the customer are often overlooked. When we build products, we usually say, “Okay, first we’ll build a product and then we’ll attach a business model at the end.” Without thinking about it comprehensively, which is what we want to avoid with this question ‘L’. Let me walk through an example of how this RDCL comes together. If I go back to the wine example…

13:53.21

Alexis Monville

Sure…

14:03.10

Alexis Monville

Yes, please do.

14:11.84

Radhika Dutt

Our startup likely had a real pain point. People were coming to this product because if they wanted to learn about and try wines, they didn’t want to read magazines that used language that felt intimidating. They wanted to learn in an easy and fun way, and find wines that they liked. That’s the real pain point that drew someone to the product.

The design aspect comes in when I consider that I can’t ask you questions about your tastes by asking things like, “Alexis, how much tannin would you like in your wine and how much acidity would you prefer?” Those types of questions are difficult for most people to understand and answer clearly, right?

15:01.47

Alexis Monville

Yes, those are expert questions. Not many people would know how to answer them, maybe just 1% of people would be able to answer them with absolute certainty.

15:10.76

Radhika Dutt

Exactly, so we ask questions that are much simpler. For example, I can infer how much tannin you might like based on how you prefer your tea or coffee. If you like it black, you probably enjoy more tannins than if you take your coffee with milk and sugar. Similarly, by assessing which fruits you prefer in a fruit salad, I can gauge how much acidity you enjoy on your palate. We can construct a quiz based on all of this. That’s the design.

The capabilities then involve mapping this to a set of wines. We have to create a database that correlates wine varietals, among other things, to such tastes. Then there’s logistics, where we consider our business model. We could charge a business model where you buy one wine at a time. But what we came up with was a subscription model, creating wine courses where you progress through the courses by tasting different wines and learning along the way.

These are examples of how this all comes together. I’ll give you another example of logistics – we didn’t have an inventory of wines we were supplying. So, we had to collaborate with partners who prioritized customer service.

16:41.12

Radhika Dutt

We had to find stores that had their inventory and could implement this model using our approach. That’s another example of logistics. So, that’s a comprehensive Radical strategy.

16:48.15

Alexis Monville

I’d like to revisit real pain points. When you say real pain points and not imagined, does that mean you’ve verified that your users actually consider these as genuine pain points? How do you go about doing that?

17:13.60

Radhika Dutt

That’s a great question, and it’s often where we stumble as product people or in innovation in general. We often assume that a pain point is real because we think it is. The formula for determining whether a pain point is real is that you must validate it. Validated equals verified plus valued. What this means is, ‘verified’ is when you’ve personally observed that someone has this issue. This could involve conducting user interviews or going out into the field to watch people in action to discern if they truly have this pain point.

But even when I mention user interviews, we can’t directly ask, “Is this a pain point for you?” People usually aim to please you and are likely to give you the answer they think you’re hoping to hear. A good user interview is one where you ask questions that seem neutral, but from which you can ascertain the pain point.

The second component, ‘valued’, is about whether someone is willing to give up something or invest something in exchange for having that problem solved.

18:24.57

Alexis Monville

I see…

18:39.73

Radhika Dutt

For instance, even with a free service like Facebook, people are willing to invest their time into it, so there is some sort of an exchange. They’re willing to give up their privacy. We can discuss the ethics of this separately, but the question of verified plus valued is crucial in determining if the pain point you’re trying to address is real.

19:06.48

Alexis Monville

Absolutely, I understand. I really like the question, it’s very useful. Moving on to prioritization, could you talk about its importance and how it’s effectively implemented?

19:18.54

Radhika Dutt

Yes, one of the things that often happens is that we work on a vision, and that vision often gets filed away for posterity. It’s like, “Okay, we’re done with that exercise. Let’s proceed with our everyday tasks now.” But prioritization is where we can bring that vision into our everyday decisions. This is incredibly important for leadership.

We often think that good leadership is about telling our teams what the top three priorities are. However, what I’ve come to realize is that good leadership is about being able to scale your thinking, enabling every person to understand your rationale for the trade-offs you’re making. This way, you don’t have to be in every meeting, but people know exactly what the right trade-offs are to make. That is what good leadership is.

So how do you do that? A lot of your rationale as a leader comes from years of experience and it’s often intuitive; you just know what the right trade-off to make in a given moment is.

20:31.70

Radhika Dutt

The hardest thing for leaders is to communicate your intuition. In the Radical Product Thinking way, the way you do that is by recognizing that when we make these trade-offs, we’re really balancing the long-term against the short term. It’s the yin and yang of long-term versus short term.

In engineering terms, this yin and yang gets converted into an X and a Y axis. Your Y axis represents whether something is a good vision fit or not, and the X-axis represents whether something is good for survival or not. So now you have this X and Y of long-term versus short-term considerations.

21:09.21

Radhika Dutt

Things that are good for the vision and good for survival are, of course, the easy decisions. But if we always just focus on these easy decisions, then we’re still being quite shortsighted. Sometimes we need to do things that are investing in the vision. This quadrant is where it’s good for the vision in the long term, but in the short term, it’s not helping you survive.

An example of investing in the vision could be spending three months refactoring code, or taking the time to do some user research.

21:31.23

Alexis Monville

I see…

21:44.92

Radhika Dutt

Your customers might not see immediate benefits, but it’s essential to do for the long run. That’s an example of investing in the vision. The opposite of that, by the way, is taking on vision debt. Vision debt is where something is good for survival, but it’s not helpful for the long-term vision. An example of this is if your customer says, “If you build this custom feature for me, then I will sign the contract.” If you keep doing this, it adds lots of vision debt.

22:21.17

Radhika Dutt

Over time, you may end up with what I call obsessive sales disorder. This is not to say that any of these quadrants are bad per se, but we have to be really mindful about how we’re making these trade-offs. As a leader, when you decide that you need to take on this vision debt, one of the most important things is even recognizing and telling your team that, “Look, I understand that we need to win this deal. We’re taking on vision debt.” By acknowledging that it’s vision debt, you’re not making the team feel like this is a top-down loss of confidence in the vision. At least your team feels like you understand the trade-off now.

23:10.56

Alexis Monville

Excellent. You even discuss in the book the idea of a survival statement. You can have a product vision statement, but you can also have a survival statement to help the team understand what you mean by survival at that moment in time.

23:28.63

Radhika Dutt

Right, exactly. When we chart vision versus survival, one of the goals is to make these decisions less contentious. Instead of “I think we should do this” versus “No, I think we should do this,” when you plot vision versus survival, it makes the discussion more objective. Are we not aligned on where this fits on the vision fit, or are we not aligned on how this is helping us survive or making survival harder?

We’ve defined the vision with a lot of clarity, answering the who, what, why, when, and how, but similarly, we should define what it means to survive. For a startup, survival might mean financial survival—I need the money to survive. If I don’t bring in the money, either through fundraising or winning a deal, my product is going to die because of financial survival.

24:42.56

Radhika Dutt

However, let’s say I’m in a big company. Maybe my company has money in the bank, so what kills my product is not necessarily financial survival, but it might be stakeholder support. Maybe if my bosses don’t approve of my product, then that’s going to kill my product, and so survival might be pleasing stakeholders. Writing a survival statement is really helpful to acknowledge what the short term means and to make these objective trade-offs.

25:09.80

Alexis Monville: It’s often difficult to balance the long-term and short-term aspects of a product. Now let’s discuss execution and measurement. How does it fit into the Radical Product Thinking framework? It felt a bit like you were making a case against the use, or maybe more accurately, the misuse of OKRs. Tell me more about that.

25:34.38

Radhika Dutt: Before we challenge OKRs directly, let’s discuss what we’re trying to achieve with execution and measurement. The goal is to determine if our vision and strategy are working. Execution and measurement are about creating a set of hypotheses for each element of the RDCL so that we can understand what our hypothesis is and how we’ll measure its success. Now, if we consider OKRs, they set a number of goals, like hitting 20,000 signups by the end of this quarter or increasing revenues by 20%. The philosophy around OKRs is about setting big, lofty goals that are challenging to achieve. But you have to step back and ask if they’re really helping measure if the strategy is working.

26:51.88

Alexis Monville: Right.

27:05.18

Radhika Dutt: As a product manager, I have all the data behind the product. If you ask me to prove that I’m meeting my goals using my product statistics, I have a lot of flexibility in showing that I am meeting those goals. However, what you really want to know is not whether I’m meeting those goals, but how the product is doing. Is the strategy working? Do we need to change our strategy? This requires a more collaborative approach. OKRs, on the other hand, don’t feel collaborative. They’re like an end-of-the-year exam. You either pass or fail, and the incentive is to show that you have passed. This misaligns leadership’s incentives with employees’ incentives. Instead, we want a collaborative environment where employees are encouraged to share what’s working, what’s not, and what hypotheses we’re observing. Maybe we need a new approach. That’s why, as I illustrate in the book, instead of OKRs, we need a collaborative approach to create hypotheses derived from our strategy and metrics for measuring whether it’s working or not.

28:45.34

Alexis Monville: I’d say there’s a misuse of OKRs. What you described could exactly be OKRs if implemented properly at a team or product level. Certainly not for individuals and not linked to their compensation, as that would skew the system entirely.

29:12.14

Radhika Dutt: I agree with you. Traditionally, people have wanted to use OKRs because vision statements were too vague, like “revolutionizing wireless.” OKRs were intended to provide a clearer narrative of the impact we’re trying to have. But expressing this solely in numbers can lead to sandbagging, where ambitious people set their goals lower for fear of failure.

30:06.78

Radhika Dutt: We definitely should not create OKRs for personal goals or for product teams because that leads to manipulations of statistics. Even at a company level, if we don’t implement OKRs properly, there’s a temptation to sandbag and avoid personal responsibility.

30:42.78

Radhika Dutt: If we don’t handle it right, there’s a fear of appearing as if one’s department has failed.

30:47.59

Alexis Monville: That transitions us nicely to culture, the last part of the framework. Can you tell us more about what you mean by culture and why it’s important?

31:02.36

Radhika Dutt: For innovation to thrive, we need a culture where people have a shared sense of purpose, autonomy, and psychological safety. The first two are covered by other elements of radical product thinking. The shared purpose comes from the vision, while autonomy comes from helping people understand how to make trade-offs. The last piece, psychological safety, is about creating a team culture where people feel they’re doing meaningful work, not distracted by company politics.

32:17.78

Radhika Dutt: It’s important to consider how employees perceive company culture because it might be different from your intentions. Think about culture on two dimensions: is work fulfilling or not, and is work urgent or not? When work is fulfilling and not urgent, that’s the most wonderful time at work.

33:05.26

Alexis Monville

Yeah, that’s what I call the impact and satisfaction and that’s always what I’m trying to drive. It’s to get to that quadrant of having an impact and I’m really satisfied by by the work I’m doing to get to that Impact. 

33:26.68

Radhika Dutt: We want to maximize that quadrant of fulfilling, non-urgent work, and minimize others. One such quadrant is heroism, where work is fulfilling but urgent. Too much of this can be exhausting. The next quadrant is organizational cactus, where work is not fulfilling but urgent, like paperwork. The last quadrant is what I call the soul-sucking quadrant, where work is neither fulfilling nor urgent, such as feeling unfairly treated or unvalued at work.

35:54.99

Radhika Dutt: A good culture maximizes meaningful work and minimizes the other three quadrants. To create such a culture, we can use the elements of radical product thinking. Define the pain points that lead to time in the bad quadrants, then work on a strategy with hypotheses and measurements. Over time, you can measure whether your culture is improving and whether your team is gelling better.

36:22.81

Alexis Monville

I Really love it because then we can use the framework to improve the culture of the organization really consider the organization itself as a product that will serve the employees to help them do their best work I Really love that.

36:45.60

Radhika Dutt: Exactly, your organization itself is a product that serves your employees. You have a vision for that change, and culture becomes your product, your mechanism for creating that change.

37:24.61

Radhika Dutt: It’s about making better products and making the world better by creating those changes.

37:29.11

Radhika Dutt: Alexis, thank you for having me on this podcast. In terms of how people can reach me, there’s the Radical Product Thinking book, which is in bookstores. They can also learn more on the blog at radicalproduct.com. I always love to hear how people are applying the Radical Product Thinking approach to create change in the world. You’re welcome to reach out to me on LinkedIn to share how you’re applying Radical Product Thinking.

38:53.71

Alexis Monville: Radhika, thank you so much for joining us today on this podcast and for sharing your invaluable insights on radical product thinking. To our listeners, you can find a transcript of this episode, our references, and more episodes at emergingleadership.network. Join us next time as we continue our exploration into leadership, innovation, and the future of work. Thank you, until then, keep leading the change.

39:32.32

Radhika Dutt: Thank you.

Photo de Ricardo Gomez Angel sur Unsplash

Over the last years, we moved from innovating in secret labs to innovating in the open.

Open source has become a key way to shape standards, accelerate adoption, and build software ecosystems that compound over time. In this episode, I’m joined by Joseph Jacks, founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, a fund focused exclusively on early-stage commercial open source companies.

Joseph’s perspective is clear: open source companies are not just proprietary software companies with a different license. They are a different species, across many dimensions.

What Joseph does, in plain words

Joseph invests in entrepreneurs building companies around open source technology.

He explains open source as a licensing approach that gives anyone permission to use, download, modify, and participate around a piece of software. Many people interpret that as “free”, but the more important dynamic is permissionless participation and the ecosystem it enables.

OSS Capital operates in private equity, specifically venture capital: investing in startups early, building a portfolio, and holding investments for a long time rather than trading.

Why start OSS Capital

Joseph came to venture after being an entrepreneur and working inside an early open source company. Along the way, he noticed two things.

First, many venture firms describe their focus in vague terms. If you survey funds, the message often sounds like: “we invest in great people building great companies.” Joseph found that lack of focus confusing.

Second, he developed conviction that open source companies are categorically different from proprietary software companies. Not in one way, but in many.

The combination of those observations led him to build a fund with a clear mandate: commercial open source, early stage, focused thesis.

Investing in projects before teams

One of the most distinctive ideas in this episode is Joseph’s approach to sourcing.

He says he does not spend his days meeting founders in pitch cycles. In most cases, OSS Capital starts differently:

• develop a point of view on a market and where disruption is happening
• identify a specific open source project that stands out
• contact the creator of the project only after conviction is built

This flips the typical VC dynamic. Instead of being pitch-driven, it is thesis-driven.

A large part of the work is separating signal from noise. Joseph describes a data-driven diligence approach using public signals in the open source world, including what can be learned from GitHub and ecosystem traction.

It resembles, in his words, some of the initial diligence patterns of public-market investors, even though venture holds are long-term.

From project to company

When OSS Capital invests, it is often at the earliest stage, sometimes when the company is being incorporated.

Joseph describes early help in several areas:

• team formation and early hiring
• shaping a business plan and monetization strategy
• understanding competitive dynamics and ecosystems
• facilitating knowledge transfer through co-investors and advisors

He emphasizes a network effect: bringing experienced builders of open source companies into rounds and relationships, so founders can learn directly from people who have already navigated the same terrain.

Why commercial open source can be more capital efficient

Joseph addresses a claim on the OSS Capital site: commercial open source companies being more capital efficient.

His core argument starts on product development.

Open source can accelerate feedback loops and improvement because the project is built in the open. More people test, adopt, contribute, and stress the technology earlier. That can reduce the cost and time needed to reach maturity compared to building privately.

Then there is go-to-market.

By the time an enterprise buyer is involved, the company may already have internal users and advocates. That changes the sales dynamic: adoption can pre-exist the sales conversation, lowering friction.

Joseph also shares a longer-running hypothesis: some open source companies historically raised more money than they needed to reach key milestones. One part of his mission is to help open source companies be understood and built in ways that improve capital efficiency.

Will open source keep growing

Joseph is strongly biased toward “yes.”

He points to a simple dependency claim: most professional software engineers rely heavily on open source, to the point that without it, modern software development would grind to a halt.

He also makes a motivation argument.

People often ask why engineers contribute without being paid. Joseph frames this through intrinsic motivation: contributing because it helps others, because it helps learning, and because it sustains the system that contributors themselves depend on. That intrinsic engine keeps the flywheel turning, even alongside extrinsic incentives.

The leadership trait that matters most

When I ask Joseph about leaders he admires, he answers: humility.

He observes that people who have accomplished a lot are often surprisingly humble. They separate what they built from who they are. That humility, combined with self-awareness, makes collaboration and problem-solving easier. It is also a trait he says he is still working on himself.

Closing thought

This conversation connects investing, ecosystems, and leadership in a useful way.

Open source changes how technology is built, how trust is earned, and how companies can grow. And behind the models and the markets, Joseph brings the discussion back to something very human: humility, and the ability to keep learning in public.

Listen to the episode:

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Here is the transcript of the episode:

Alexis

This is Le Podcast on Emerging Leadership. I am Alexis Monville. Over the last years, people have moved from innovating in secret labs to innovating in the open, and open-source became the way to define industry standards. Today, I am pleased to have Joseph Jacks on the podcast to explore the open-source world. Joseph is the founder and General Partner of OSS Capital, a fund that exclusively focuses on early-stage commercial open source companies.

Hey Joseph, how would you describe your role to someone you just met?

Joseph

Well, I invest in entrepreneurs building companies around open source technology, and if you don’t understand or if you’ve never heard of open source. It’s basically a way of licensing a piece of software a piece of technology in a way that anyone can use or download or modify or really participate in the commercial opportunities around that technology and so it kind of gives you this permissionless dynamic a lot of people think of that as free. Free to use, free to modify.

Alexis

Interesting so investing in entrepreneurs, how does it work. Are you doing that by yourself?

Joseph

That’s essentially what I do. I have a venture capital fund. There’s a part of the world called private equity. So there’s public equity. A lot of people might be familiar with public stocks like if you look at Apple or Microsoft or Walmart or whatever public company that’s kind of called public equity and you can buy and sell shares of those companies as an individual retail investor in whatever country you happen to be living in. You have a few dollars sitting around and then there’s the world of private equity where private companies manage their businesses without the scrutiny and regulation of being a publicly traded company. So private companies operate with a lot less public oversight and government oversight but at the same time, they really produce, I believe, the vast majority of innovation and economic breakthroughs in the world. And so in the technology industry, there’s a part of the private company sector called startups and you know there’s a lot of different definitions for the word startup and sort of what that means. But startups essentially refer it to a group of people could be one person building some type of technology that solves a critical problem. An interesting problem for the world and addresses some critical pain points, could be around automation, could be around giving people more insights into some information or data, making some business processes more efficient, a lot of different things. And there’s a specific type of startup that I focus on investing in and it’s a startup where the creator Is focused initially on building an open source technology of some kind and so typically is a project that is built towards addressing some problem for developers and or is built in the open transparently and allows people to see the technology in its entirety. You can read basically the entire ingredients and source code around that technology if you’re interested and want to you can actually modify and change that technology yourself.

Joseph

For example, if you’re a consumer of an early product that might launch on Kickstarter or maybe a big company. Maybe a new Apple product or something and you wanted to be able to contribute and change and modify that product or technology in some kind of way. It would really be either impossible or very very difficult to do that unless that technology was open source. The interesting thing about the startups that I invest in through my fund which is basically a venture capital fund. We invest money on behalf of others, limited partners. It’s really all of my money and also other people’s money that I manage and basically, our fund makes investment decisions in early-stage startups that basically fit our investment thesis and so. Going back to our investment thesis, we basically identify and develop a point of view around open source technologies that we think can really be the basis for overtime very large and impactful businesses.

Alexis

So tell me about the pivotal moment that led you to start OSS capital?

Joseph

Well, I was previously an entrepreneur for a number of years I started a couple of startups that really resemble our thesis and there were companies building a business, building a commercial opportunity. For the founders and investors of those businesses as well as the ecosystems they were operating in around some open source technology of some kind and so I developed a pretty strong understanding of this approach for a few years just as an entrepreneur. And I also got to know a bunch of people in the venture capital industry and in that kind of category of asset management and a lot of the observations that I developed around that motivated me to start OSS capital and so specifically what I learned there were a few structural things that I learned about venture capital. The main ones is that venture capitalists, very few of them have a clear focus mandates. In other words, if you were to survey maybe the top ones or even maybe the top 50 capital funds, they really just, the extent to which you can get a sense of their focus boils down to “we like to invest in great people building great companies” and so it’s really difficult to get a sense of what they actually focus on. At least from my standpoint that’s one aspect I was always kind of confused by. When you learn about open source in the context of building a product or a business it’s really the fundamental thing. It’s kind of you’re building the entire product or business around some core open source technology. What I developed as a point of view over many years from working at pretty early open source company called Talend which originally started in France and worked at a couple of other companies after that were fully proprietary software businesses is, and I developed the point of view that though those companies were different kind of they’re just like a different species of company right? There’s sort of unique on their own, on a lot of different dimensions. Not just one dimension but many many dimensions and those observations really stuck with me and so the combination of first noticing that there was very little focus in venture capital as an issue and then that combined with there’s really kind of No one types of technology companies. There’s ones that are just a fully proprietary technology behind the scenes and you’re commercializing and monetizing that somehow as compared to a sort of a type of company where the core technology behind the company is an open source project of some kind is a very different kind of company. I really started to believe and just that belief kind of continued to intensify over the years that building a commercial open source companies or open core orientiented companies and we really have to kind of invent new language to really describe why these companies are very different in many different aspects but basically those observations, the fact that I felt, and I still really largely feel that venture capital has very little focus and then being that open source companies are really fundamentally different and maybe they deserve their own unique kind of focused structure, really motivated me to start out as capital. I guess the one piece that gave me the confidence to do it was I felt at the time and maybe I feel this slightly less. So now I still probably feel this a little bit but maybe a healthy dose. I felt extremely unqualified to try to basically, solve this problem in a way that would require basically starting my own venture fund and going out and raising money from people and making investments and proving out the thesis. Until I noticed that no one else was really doing it. I had sort of made some assumptions that other people might jump into this and build a fund focused exclusively on investing in open source founders. But after getting to know a bunch of folks in the venture world, it quickly became apparent that was most likely not going to happen, not because people didn’t feel like it was a good idea. Good idea or not but really that required a very deep amount of conviction and belief that open source companies are sort of categorically different, qualitatively different and could actually grow into a large meaningful category on their own over time right? And so this is like 2017 2018 kind of timeframe. So yeah, that’s basically why I started the fund and yeah been a fun journey since then.

Alexis

Yeah, then I can imagine. It’s different If you’re a fund and you want to invest in IP and you don’t you don’t have any Ip or not the way that people think about Ip in the more traditional way. So it’s of course a default focus and I like the fact that draw really focus on something or gone he wanted to say something.

Joseph

Yeah, that’s true.

Ah, no, no, no I think you’re exactly right? it requires a change in mindset and to revisiting a lot of previous assumptions and points of view on on how intellectual property works for sure.

Alexis

Um, so tell me what you are looking for when you meet with startup founders.

Joseph

Well, I don’t meet with any startup founders. Really I mean I focus exclusively on this world of open source technology and it’s interesting like most of our investments I would actually say probably 95% of our investments have been made by developing point of view. And then secondarily developing a thesis around a project that exists in the world and then sort of a none step contacting the creator of the project introducing ourselves. And telling them that we really like what they’re doing really a lot of the hard work and probably most of the hard work is in developing conviction that the person or the people the team behind creating the project are also the right people to start a company that you know can raise millions of dollars and go and potentially build a large business and so we spend a lot of time investigating whether the creators of the project can also be potentially great founders of building a company. And a lot of the time we don’t believe that’s true and we just don’t invest. But sometimes when the stars align then we invest. It’s quite different from the traditional venture capital approach where you’re sort of getting pitches all day and you’re sitting through pitch meetings and you’re taking introductions or whatever like we’ve certainly been introduced to a handful of people and we made some investments that way but I would say the vast majority of the time is we’re really just looking at a lot of data in the open source world developing a point of view about which markets are getting disrupted over others. And which categories can be created at what points in time we’re looking at changes in the software industry, the rates of growth in different areas like new categories that exist that didn’t exist before and we really start to kind of understand does open source have an advantage in a particular area for whatever reason and if it does the really interesting thing about open source is there’s so many implementations it’s kind of this cambrian explosion of implementations and approaches that starts to happen. Once it’s pretty clear something could work. Have a lot of people really trying to work on proving that out in the open source world. So a big part of our job is really just trying to understand from separating all the signal and the noise what stands out. What’s actually really interesting from a growth standpoint, from an engineering quality standpoint. There’s a lot of things that you can determine and understand by really just looking at Github and looking at the data. That is publicly available really to anyone and so it’s actually extremely fascinating doing what we do as a private seed stage venture capital investor has a lot of similarities to the way hedge funds manage public equity investments, at least in terms of the way they do some of the initial diligence I would certainly say it’s very different terms of how we hold the investments. We hold them for a very long time and we never we’re not selling and trading in and out of them like hedge funds, but the data-driven aspect is very intensely prominent in the way we actually, basically develop an investment thesis and a point of view about specific investment.

Alexis

Yeah, it’s’s really interesting to see that. Of course, it’s building the open so you can do the due diligence by yourself. So How do you help those project people to go from the project to building a company.

Joseph

Well a lot of the time I would say almost all the time when we lead or are the co-lead of a round we are involved when the company is incorporated or we actually help incorporate the company. And so it’s pretty much at the very earliest of the stages like when the project is at a point where the creators have decided and they’re interested in building a business around the open source technology and they appreciate that the purpose of that business is to invest and continue to grow the open source technology and just really continue to do what they’ve been doing the main things that we are helpful with when we make an investment are kind of multifaceted but I’d say the main things would be the formation of the team of the people that basically comprise the company and join the company. The formation of an understanding of a business plan and a monetization strategy whether that’s executed immediately or over time over the course of many years. We help a lot with thinking about competitive market dynamics understanding the broader ecosystem understanding kind of how the ecosystems coming together. A lot of people would maybe say this is the main contribution that we bring is we really make sure that it’s not only on an advisory basis. But a co-investment basis that other really great individuals who’ve built hugely successful open source companies from the last thirty you know 15 20 30 years actually come along the journey with us. It’s not that we like to be alone and we don’t mind being alone and we have a lot of you know, very high conviction in pretty much every investment that we make but, we really want to create a mechanism for doing knowledge transfer. We talked about this a couple of days ago but we have this kind of network of people that join us as angel investors in rounds a lot of them are our investors in our fund a lot of them are just advisors to companies that we’ve worked with. And they’re really great people I mean they’re individuals who basically from the idea stage and as founders built really amazing companies like Red Hat, Confluent, Github, Mongodb, Elastic, many really great open source companies that you think of today. A lot of those people can be really valuable and helpful, partners to new founders that are really just trying to figure out a lot of things that they’re encountering for the first time but other people may have already developed different points of view and and have encountered in the past already. So we really try to do this kind of knowledge transfer process where bringing other people onboard as co-investors as Angels and as advisors in really any kind of capacity really just to help these founders that we work with be more successful in whatever they’re dealing with whether it’s like hiring or building their community in a certain way or, even raising their next round of funding or should they raise the next round of funding. You know the different points of view on different other investors just a lot of different topics and so. Those are the kinds of things that we tend to help with early On. Because the companies are so early they’re all sort of facing similar challenges around like how to how to manage the growth of their communities, how to make their first or 10 hires, how to think about Market dynamics and their business Model. We tend to kind of cross-pollinate a lot of the ideas across the portfolio and also connect the founders with each other so they can kind of learn from each other as well and it’s actually reasonably easy to do that because all the companies are, kind of somewhat somewhat homogenous and similar and at least in terms of their fundamental structure. They’re all building companies and businesses around some core open source projects. They tend to learn from each other pretty pretty rapidly.

Alexis

Oh yeah I love that idea of leveraging the the power of the community to really build other companies I like that I read on your website that commercial open source software companies are 50% more capital efficient. Did I read that correctly? How would you explain that?

Joseph

Yeah, that’s something that we put up on our website. Actually our website currently today I think today’s June Thirtieth 2022 I think it’s the same website, we’ve actually had on on the internet since September Twenty Eighteen so we’re we’re actually pushing out a brand new website pretty soon I wouldn’t say that to correct the statements on the website. I think they’re all pretty accurate. Still 50% I think is low as a rough estimate. There’s a reason why I really deeply believe that open source businesses, commercial open source businesses are more capital efficient than other types of businesses and really the main reason is the following. So like if you think about a company that is building a totally proprietary product in isolation, in a cave, or in a closet or whatever metaphor you want to use. The energy required to build that product is a function of how much time and resources you need to invest in order to get that product delivered to the market or into some state where you can actually start seeing adoption and and typically you’ll really see a couple of a couple of things like the cost for doing that will either be subsidized by the individuals behind that technology themselves so they’ll sort of be self-funding that it will be through other sources of financing. You might have to raise money to sort of build that initial technology and prove that out or or another company could be funding it somehow you could be doing it nights and weekends on the side but by the time you launch something you kind of typically already spent a lot of time and energy into building that out. So it really just is is a lot more expensive to do that. With open source, it’s very very very different. The open source you have this kind of idea, you start building in the open from the beginning a lot of projects don’t quite do this and they they build in private and they have a lot of engineering cycles invested before sort of quote unquote flipping the switch on a repository and making it public. I Guess from that standpoint you could say that they’re very similar I mean you still have to make the investment in building out the project and building out the technology but with with open source because you have this dynamic where the project can actually benefit from an accelerated feedback input from many more people than possible if it was built in private and it was sort of a closed Beta and you had a wait list or whatever. It just makes the product and the technology better at a faster rate and as a consequence it reduces the cost to bring the technology to a state of stability and maturity and development velocity really that would otherwise be possible with a proprietary approach and so as a result by the time that we invest in a company around an open source technology. Most of the cases show that the project already has, a sort of an equivalent amount of adoption testing QA, development and really contribution from a lot of people that otherwise you’d have to kind of raise many millions of dollars to produce if you were building a fully proprietary technology company and that’s just on the research and development sort of core technology side of things if you look at customer acquisition and revenue and building a business. Lot of the things that we’ve seen as well are that capital efficiencies are even greater in in that area. So with open source projects, you have this developer community that could use the technology in a lot of different ways, and in many different flexible contexts and lots of use cases. They could be building out and by the time you sort of navigate to a buyer inside of maybe an enterprise organization an it or a line of business or a CTO organization, a lot of the time they might actually already be users of your technology and they might already be advocates and they could in fact, they could just survey their developer community and sort of recognize wow we’re actually already using your technology and everyone loves it. So by the time that we want to start negotiating a contract or you know understand what your product or your services were already sold like there’s no need to sell us and at that point it starts to become much easier and the friction starts to to drop dramatically for the startup or for the company wants to sell something that thing efficiently and sell it with the least amount of friction possible and so instead of the old way of selling software. This is actually not necessarily the old way I think this is actually largely still how it works in sort of proprietary saas world is you have a lot of customer acquisition dollar spent to just get in front of the customer and get users and get adoption and then you have another big wave of dollars spent to convert those um those users into paying customers and so that’s why I think we have in in this kind of saas category we have all these terms like viral coefficients and all the conversion rate heuristics. All these different things that are really optimized around. Okay, you’ve spent a certain amount of dollars to just get the adoption wheel flywheel going and then you have another amount of dollars that you spend to figure out how to convert those users and I’m not saying all those things go away completely. Obviously you still have to invest time and energy and sort of navigating how to convert all of your of your adoption into a business of some kind, fractionally or marginally speaking. But with open source has a sort of phenomena that helps not just with distribution and marketing. It also helps with quality of the product, innovation rate of the product, trust of the product and so many other things. I believe the 50% capital efficiency percentage that you’re that you’re pointing to on the website there is pretty low and in fact, I think that percentage amount was actually referring to something a little bit more specific and so I can kind of explain what it is in like 30 seconds or so but it’s basically pointing to there’s a cohort of open source businesses in the last kind of first years that reached 100M or more in revenue what I was referring to in that percentage was that on average those businesses went out and raised I believe about a quarter of a billion dollars to reach that level of revenue.

Joseph

Meaning that they went out and raised a seed round a series a, series b, a series c, and in some cases a series d to reach a 100M revenue business and I would argue and and this is a long-running hypothesis that we’re actively testing with OSS Capital.

Alexis

I Get this.

Joseph

And hopefully, we’ll see what the data looks like in the next 5 years or something, but I would argue that in all, not some all of those cases, those companies raised too much money that they did not need to raise in order to reach the same outcomes and the same revenue milestones, in, in fact, the same amount of time. So, as a result, you can say those companies were overfunded or they raised money unnecessarily, however, you want to express that is basically part of our mission with OSS Capital is to change a few things about the way open source businesses are built so that they can be better understood from a fundamental standpoint and basically run more capital efficiently.

Alexis

So based on all that we can expect that we will have more people creating open source software in the future right? Do you see that really growing?

Joseph

Well, this is an interesting question There’s a lot of research and reports that I can point to, maybe you can include them in the show notes, that show the rate of open source. Some people point to it as declining, some people point to it as growing. tend to be very biased in thinking that the rate of open source is only expanding and growing. One proxy for that would be looking at Github’s data. They’re going to reach something like 100M registered users pretty soon I think when Microsoft acquired them in 2018, they were around 30M users. So they’ve grown quite a lot over the last few years. It’s not to say that every registered account on Github is someone creating open source I don’t think that’s true. It’s probably a fraction of that 100M that we’re about to see on GitHub actually creating open source projects, but one thing that I do think is true in a broader sense is more humans are becoming aware of the fact that sort of the highest leverage and the most impactful professional career. You can pursue is in software development, software engineering and more specifically building software products and I believe that building software products will over time become more and more automated and humans will need to learn fewer technologies and fewer languages to build complex innovative products, but I do not subscribe to the point of view that the ai is going to be writing all the code for us I do not believe that is true, and so I think more people, more humans will need to learn how to program and write code for computers because with the way computers are currently built, we need to express very precise instructions to that computer in order for the computer to do what we want it to do and I don’t believe that the the Ai models today can generate the level of precision and nuance needed to build complex software products that do very arbitrarily complex things for humans whether it’s infrastructure software, database, software application, software what have you? there are too many wide encompassing aspects of the technology stack that need to be fine-tuned and tweaked and implemented using code and software largely stitched together, managed, or written by hand via humans and so as a result I can only be most confident in the fact that as the software and that sort of this digital technology career starts to become more compelling and interesting to more people because this is really where the highest leverage and the highest compensation is in in the tech industry, more people will realize in order to be the most differentiated you really have to learn. You have to learn how computers speak and as a result you have to learn how to program and I think as that happens if you look at all of the software engineers today, all the professional software engineers, there’s a lot of debate we can do around this but like I think largely speaking most people would agree, there’s somewhere in the order of 20 or 30M software engineers in the world like professional software engineers. Some people say 50M, so let’s say it’s somewhere between 30 and 50M. I would argue, and I think most people would agree that 99.9 of all of those software engineers heavily heavily depend on open source, and it’s not a question of how much they depend on open source. It’s really they fundamentally depend on open source like without open source technology and tools and infrastructure. They would not be able to do their jobs period like that. They would not be productive like imagine as a developer that you went to your computer, and instead of using millions of projects that exist, that you can readily access on the internet for free and pull together in your application to be productive and build something for the World. You had to write your own custom compiler from Scratch. You had to write your own programming language from scratch. You had to write your own application server from Scratch. You had to write your own development framework from Scratch. You know you had to write your own networking stack from scratch and your own database runtime from scratch and a long list of things. You would never get anything done. It would take you decades of your life to get anything done if you were very talented in the modern world, and so I think that there there’s this. There’s this leverage that exists with open source that is unquantifiable and immeasurable, and as a result, software engineers really greatly appreciate that. And they continue to participate in that movement. This is an interesting kind of Phenomena that non-technical people. People who do not code or do not understand how computers work. They just don’t understand how it works. A lot of time when I’m talking to our investors who, in a lot of cases, are non-technical institutions or other individuals and they do that. They’re not familiar with open source. They’ll often ask this question. Why is it that humans continue to invest so much of their time in this open source thing when they’re not getting paid and they don’t have any economic benefit and. It’s kind of interesting that people ask this question because it’s very revealing of the lack of appreciation for, how much benefit and Leverage engineers get from helping other engineers. Right? There’s this really interesting tribal aspect where engineers are very motivated to help other engineers and the way that they do that most efficiently and effectively is by contributing to open source and sharing their project and sharing their their insights with others. And that just perpetuates the growth of this community and so I think as more people come into the tech industry and appreciate that software engineering is the highest leverage discipline.Then they become software engineers. They realize that the only way they can continue to benefit from all the things that come with that is to really contribute to open source and to give back to that community. I think that just continues to expand the flywheel of open source and it continues to accelerate the fundamentals. Another aspect that people don’t really appreciate is there’s really two types of motivations in the world. There’s motivation to do something for an extrinsic reward sort of like an extrinsic motivation I’m doing something to get paid some monetary or some measurable reward. Or you’re doing something intrinsically you have you have this intrinsic motivation you’re doing it out of the goodness of your heart or in order to learn something new or to have a good feeling about participating in some positive system and that’s really what open source is all about people do it for the intrinsic reason that helping others sort of overrides all the other motivations. And they want to do that specifically because they’ve benefited from all these infrastructure that already exists and so I think it’s kind of a counterintuitive thing. It’s a little bit difficult for non-technical people to understand. But I think it’s pretty profound and I believe that’s the the kind of the main reason open source will continue to grow and be be a huge force. Overtime in the future and actually furthermore I have a much more kind of aggressive point of view around this which is that I think open source will not only just continue its current pace. But as people realize more how powerful this approach is for building technology I think that we’re going to see open source disrupt and transform pretty much every category in the at a minimum, the digital technology world which is all of software all of consumer applications, pretty much anything digital that you can imagine.

Alexis

Wow that this is really impactful and speaking about intrinsic motivation, changing the world is a good one. I love it. Joseph, you worked with a lot of leaders among those who you admire what’s the one trait that stands out to you.

Joseph

I would say the main trait that stands out to me is humility. Um people who have accomplished a lot and are extremely successful at what they do tend to have humility and it’s one thing that I’ve noticed. And that has really stood out to me and something that I’m still personally working on. I can definitely have a lot of arrogance and hubris a lot of times. So developing humility I think is a really important attribute that I really admire and it’s actually something that is easy to forget like when you’re really trying to identify the absolute best people in whatever area that you’re looking into and you’re trying to find the best insights and the most skilled people who have just a level of depth that is hard to express, because it’s kind of experiential or some individual has accomplished some massive outcome or built something really huge. I would say the vast majority of the time people who have accomplished really huge things if you really sit down with them and get to know them. They’re very humble and in fact, they’re so humble that they sort of look back at everything that they’ve built and they think, they almost think very little of it. They sort of think I learned a lot from that but I don’t think that’s what defines me as a human and it’s an interesting quality that I appreciate a lot. Probably the main quality. The reason I’m so interested in this is I’d say there some leaders who don’t have that quality where they may actually be very accomplished and may be extremely good at what they do, but they don’t have this humility that comes with a level of self-awareness that becomes very valuable in conversations when you’re partnering with them or you’re collaborating with them or you’re trying to solve a problem and that’s probably the number one thing that I pay attention to these days.

Alexis

Excellent, Really really beautiful and inspiring. Thank you very much Joseph for having joined the podcast today.

Joseph

Thank you Alexis for having me.

Photo by Ian Schneider on Unsplash