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0 pointsrapnie3y ago0 comments

This is a recent announcement on their community forum that provides more background and detail: https://community.penpot.app/t/penpot-our-time-has-come/1563

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marapuru3y ago· 1 in thread

I’ve read through that post and think the most insightful part is this:

“ Most investors will love what you have achieved but also feel strongly about creating immediate commercial results. We were excited to learn that Jon, Sudip and Dan from Decibel 28 were a different group of investors. If you want a patient investor who gets open source and community, look no further - nobody beats Decibel’s passion and care for your team’s vision and encourage you to build a strong open-source community around your company!”

But the terminology used is hollow and finite. Why would they provide an open source company with $8M? Passion alone? There must be some sort of ROI they aim for. So what is that?

chakrabartis3y ago

Hi - Sudip from Decibel here. Backing oss companies is most of what we do; so, couple of thoughts fwiw. first, building an oss company is really building two companies and definitely not at the expense of one another. For the community, there has to be a free-forever, well-supported product, period. Without that, there is no community in the long run and hence, no company either. The enterprise business, when that comes, must be focused entirely on delivering value to enterprises and NOT on monetizing individual users. That’s what we strongly believe at Decibel and that’s what we have found mission-driven oss founders believe too. But, this certainly requires more patience and capital; hence, the need for complete alignment all around.

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