This is really cool, and something I’ve thought about a lot from various perspectives. This space badly needs some source of cohesion.
You don’t need my advice but I noticed you said:
Our hope is to make device integration simple…
I think you should use more assertive language! You know it can be done so you don’t need to hope — it’s what you’re going to do!
Do or do not, there is no try!
I love this idea in any case. I would echo others in asking why this won’t be more open, though.
This reminds me a bit of Viam (https://www.viam.com/). Different, but exciting to see APIs geared towards making IoT and robotics more accessible and efficient to interface with.
Duly noted on using more assertive language! I appreciate the advice :)
Viam looks really cool! We didn't know about it.
On making Seam more open, it's definitely not off the table. We'll have to balance this with device manufacturers' general preference to have "somebody they can call" if/when their servers get pounded. Admittedly, we've also been focused on making sure Seam becomes a sustainable business. Spending time open sourcing our stuff, making it runable elsewhere...etc takes time away from making sure we get to "default alive" quickly.
I (personally) think the value towards openness of platform and source is rooted in the fact that a lot of inbound leads come from direct recommendations from independent developers that work for the companies looking to buy. In other words, the weekend hacker/home automation geek gets their company to use the enterprise offering of the ecosystem or platform they discovered.
Additionally, as a new company, it’s hard to convince someone that you will be around for the 5 years of a contract term when you’re not even 5 years old yet. Having a lot of your stuff open source gives them the off-ramp they would need to feel comfortable signing a deal with a younger company.
This works as long as the value you bring is with the team and a breadth of knowledge and experience behind it along with the incentives to continue to improve upon the product. Considering the amount of IoT devices there are and how much of it lacks interoperability, I’d say there’s plenty of value to be sold yet.
Early in the Seam journey, Dawn and I got a chance to speak with Jeff Lawson at Twilio. Jeff mentioned that exact dynamic, "the dev who's hacking on the weekend with Twilio and brings into work Monday morning" was a pretty powerful GTM force for them. But I don't think anyone would describe Twilio as open source. So being open-source doesn't appear to be a necessary condition for this dynamic to take place. What Jeff insisted on was the need for solid overlap between "i'm hacking with this API" and "i could use this for a business use case." That is, make the API product dead simple to get started with, and make sure it's easy to grasp how you could use this in a business context.
With respect to having an off-ramp by being open-source, I definitely agree that it does the psychological trick to convince a buyer. But in practically, most corporate-led open source projects are pretty hard to run end-to-end on your own infra. They also have limited outside contributors that really know how the stuff works.
With respect to Seam, I'd say being open-source wouldn't really move the needle for us in conversations with large enterprise customers. They're generally more interested in how much funding we have, how much runway that buys us, and how we're trending as far as building a sustainable business on which they will depend. Their tolerance for risk related to these questions is inversely proportional to their size. I suppose this is also why, in infrastructure sales, your next customer won't be significantly larger than the last one you closed.
This all makes sense. I've been there. Open source is a nice-to-have when you don't have the revenue you need, and I'm personally guilty of pursuing revenue first on virtually every project I've been on. It's hard not to when you don't have a safety net yet.
Comments
This is really cool, and something I’ve thought about a lot from various perspectives. This space badly needs some source of cohesion.
You don’t need my advice but I noticed you said:
I think you should use more assertive language! You know it can be done so you don’t need to hope — it’s what you’re going to do!
Do or do not, there is no try!
I love this idea in any case. I would echo others in asking why this won’t be more open, though.
This reminds me a bit of Viam (https://www.viam.com/). Different, but exciting to see APIs geared towards making IoT and robotics more accessible and efficient to interface with.
Duly noted on using more assertive language! I appreciate the advice :) Viam looks really cool! We didn't know about it.
On making Seam more open, it's definitely not off the table. We'll have to balance this with device manufacturers' general preference to have "somebody they can call" if/when their servers get pounded. Admittedly, we've also been focused on making sure Seam becomes a sustainable business. Spending time open sourcing our stuff, making it runable elsewhere...etc takes time away from making sure we get to "default alive" quickly.
I (personally) think the value towards openness of platform and source is rooted in the fact that a lot of inbound leads come from direct recommendations from independent developers that work for the companies looking to buy. In other words, the weekend hacker/home automation geek gets their company to use the enterprise offering of the ecosystem or platform they discovered.
Additionally, as a new company, it’s hard to convince someone that you will be around for the 5 years of a contract term when you’re not even 5 years old yet. Having a lot of your stuff open source gives them the off-ramp they would need to feel comfortable signing a deal with a younger company.
This works as long as the value you bring is with the team and a breadth of knowledge and experience behind it along with the incentives to continue to improve upon the product. Considering the amount of IoT devices there are and how much of it lacks interoperability, I’d say there’s plenty of value to be sold yet.
Early in the Seam journey, Dawn and I got a chance to speak with Jeff Lawson at Twilio. Jeff mentioned that exact dynamic, "the dev who's hacking on the weekend with Twilio and brings into work Monday morning" was a pretty powerful GTM force for them. But I don't think anyone would describe Twilio as open source. So being open-source doesn't appear to be a necessary condition for this dynamic to take place. What Jeff insisted on was the need for solid overlap between "i'm hacking with this API" and "i could use this for a business use case." That is, make the API product dead simple to get started with, and make sure it's easy to grasp how you could use this in a business context.
With respect to having an off-ramp by being open-source, I definitely agree that it does the psychological trick to convince a buyer. But in practically, most corporate-led open source projects are pretty hard to run end-to-end on your own infra. They also have limited outside contributors that really know how the stuff works.
With respect to Seam, I'd say being open-source wouldn't really move the needle for us in conversations with large enterprise customers. They're generally more interested in how much funding we have, how much runway that buys us, and how we're trending as far as building a sustainable business on which they will depend. Their tolerance for risk related to these questions is inversely proportional to their size. I suppose this is also why, in infrastructure sales, your next customer won't be significantly larger than the last one you closed.
This all makes sense. I've been there. Open source is a nice-to-have when you don't have the revenue you need, and I'm personally guilty of pursuing revenue first on virtually every project I've been on. It's hard not to when you don't have a safety net yet.
I'm glad it wasn't annoying!
"Our mission is to make device integration simple..." would be more appropriate