DevTools Brew #33: 30 Years of Red Hat: A Journey from Open Source Pioneers to IBM Acquisition, Lessons From Failures: “We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed”...
Hey folks, welcome to DevTools Brew #33!
If you're new here, my name is Morgan Perry, co-founder of Qovery, and every Saturday, I share the stories, strategies, and insights behind the most successful devtool companies.
In this Issue #33:
📈 30 Years of Red Hat: A Journey from Open Source Pioneers to IBM Acquisition
💻 Lessons From Failures: “We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed”
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
💰 Devtools Funding Rounds of The Week
I hope you will enjoy this new edition.
Let's dive in!
📈 30 Years of Red Hat: A Journey from Open Source Pioneers to IBM Acquisition
Red Hat, the Raleigh-based software company, has come a long way from its humble beginnings. From two enthusiasts in Durham to a multibillion-dollar corporation through IBM's monumental $34B acquisition, let's unravel the key milestones that shaped Red Hat's remarkable 30-year history.
30-year history: Key Milestones
The Open Source Journey
1983
The foundation of Red Hat's story lies in the founding of the GNU Project by American software programmer Richard Stallman, creating a pioneering software-sharing community.
1991
Finnish student Linus Torvalds introduced Linux, an open-source PC operating system. He shared its source code online, paving the way for collaborative development.
1993
Marc Ewing designed Red Hat Linux, a Linux-based software distribution program. Bob Young, an electronics salesperson, joined forces with Ewing to market it.
Growth and Recognition
1998
Red Hat's Linux 5.2 receives InfoWorld magazine's "Operating System of the Year" award, triumphing over Microsoft's Windows.
Intel and Netscape became some of Red Hat's first major corporate investors.
Red Hat moved to the Meridian Business Complex in Research Triangle Park, marking significant growth with around 80 employees.
Going Public and Leadership Transition
1999
Red Hat went public with a remarkable first-day stock market performance, making it worth $3.5 billion.
Bob Young steps down as CEO, succeeded by software executive Matthew Szulik.
Financial Stability and Expansion
2001
Red Hat posted its first profitable quarter, highlighting its financial stability.
2002
Red Hat relocated to North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus, housing 630 employees and achieving $79 million in annual revenue.
Challenges and Leadership Evolution
2006
Despite Oracle's attempts to challenge Red Hat's dominance in the Linux distribution market, Red Hat retained its position as the largest distributor of open-source Linux.
2008
Jim Whitehurst becomes Red Hat's third CEO.
Local Engagement and Headquarters Expansion
2012
Red Hat secured naming rights to Raleigh's 6,000-seat downtown amphitheater, reinforcing its local presence.
2013
Red Hat moved its headquarters to a 19-story tower in downtown Raleigh, expanding its workforce to over 900 locally and 5,700 worldwide.
Strategic Acquisitions
2015
Red Hat announced the acquisition of Ansible, a Durham-based software firm, for approximately $100 million. Ansible's automation platform became strategically crucial for both Red Hat and its future parent company, IBM.
IBM Acquisition
2019
IBM acquired Red Hat for a staggering $34 billion, one of the most significant software acquisitions in history. Red Hat boasts 13,360 global employees and yearly revenues of $3.3 billion at the time of the purchase.
Leadership Continuity
2020
Jim Whitehurst stepped down as CEO, making way for Paul Cormier, a longstanding Red Hat executive, to take the reins.
2022
Red Hat appointed Matt Hicks as its fifth CEO, emphasizing continuity and leadership within the company.
Challenges and Promise
2023
Hicks announces that Red Hat will lay off around 4% of its global workforce, affecting roughly 2,200 employees in the Triangle area
Red Hat's journey embodies the dynamic spirit of the technology industry, forging ahead with a legacy of open-source innovation in the ever-evolving tech landscape.
Red Hat's remarkable 30-year journey unfolds as a compelling narrative of transformation. From its origins in the ethos of open-source innovation to its pivotal integration into the IBM ecosystem, Red Hat's timeline was marked by key milestones and persistent innovation.
💻 Lessons From Failures: “We built the fastest CI in the world. It failed”
Not every venture yields success, but every setback offers a valuable lesson. In the relentless pursuit of innovation, the Earthly team embarked on an audacious journey to create the world's fastest Continuous Integration (CI) system. However, as with many ambitious ventures, the outcome did not match their initial expectations. This is a story of audacity, experimentation, and valuable lessons learned 👇
Key Takeaways
The Fastest CI Quest
Earthly's bold quest was to create a CI/CD system that seamlessly combined the build system with CI, emphasizing distributed builds.
Dreaming big was the easy part; the real challenge was in execution.
Competing with tech giants with vast resources required a unique approach. Success lay in excelling significantly in a specific aspect rather than attempting to match them feature for feature.
Earthly learned the importance of early validation coming from a passionate group of users who found the product remarkably better for their unique needs.
The Master Plan for Earthly CI
Earthly devised a strategic plan to break their grand vision into smaller, independently validated products.
The initial product, Earthly, concentrated on ensuring build consistency, bridging the gap between local and CI/CD environments.
Earthly Satellites, the second milestone, harnessed the power of caching and parallelism to boost build speed.
Earthly CI aimed to compete with major CIs like GitHub Actions and CircleCI. The distinction in value propositions became a pivotal factor.
Milestone 1: Earthly
Earthly initially served as a low-risk validation project, launched independently and with minimal funding.
The surprising validation came from users who recognized its value, including notable companies like VMware and Adobe.
Milestone 2: Earthly Satellites
The implementation of Earthly Satellites brought significant advantages despite its initial flaws.
Users adopted it even before it became a commercial offering, signifying its value.
Milestone 3: Earthly CI
Earthly CI appeared to be a game-changer, capturing the attention of VPs of engineering with the promise of 2-20 times faster builds.
The closer they got to the Earthly CI launch, the more promising it seemed.
The Early Symptoms
After Earthly CI's launch, Earthly encountered a notable difference between new and existing users.
New users were skeptical and often concerned about migration costs.
Existing users, having experienced the benefits of Earthly, were more inclined to support the product.
The Most Ridiculous Negative Lead Qualification Criteria Ever
Direct sales calls didn't resonate with prospects. Instead, users preferred exploring products on their own terms.
Surprisingly, requesting a demo became a negative signal, signifying a poor fit for the product.
Earthly recognized the stark contrast in user acquisition based on different approaches.
Problems Converting Earthly Users
Converting existing Earthly users into Earthly CI users proved more challenging than anticipated.
The product didn't align with user requirements, and users couldn't see the benefits.
Users who already enjoyed Earthly's value were content with Earthly Satellites, as it met their needs effectively.
Validating the Invalidation
Earthly shifted its product messaging to emphasize "builds" rather than "CI," doubling conversions.
Despite efforts, Earthly CI failed to gain the expected traction.
Lessons From Another Life
Earthly's founder reflects on a past startup experience from 2016. In this venture, their vision was to create a security agent capable of protecting cloud apps from vulnerabilities in the source code.
However, this complex endeavor was marked by over a year of effort and significant challenges. The initial product proved unappealing to the target market.
The team faced a difficult decision. They believed that by adding more features, they could overcome the product's rough edges and appeal to customers.
They persisted for an additional year and a half, but despite extensive efforts, their product failed to gain traction. This setback highlighted critical mistakes.
In retrospect, they realized that they had not built the product incrementally based on user feedback. There were early signals that some aspects of the product didn't align with industry needs, but they didn't pay heed.
The experience taught them the importance of building smaller, validated components of the end vision as independent products.
Earthly draws parallels between these lessons and their own journey, understanding that additional features might not be the solution. Their incremental approach now guides their strategy.
What’s Next for Earthly
Earthly made the decision to shut down Earthly CI and refocus on their successful products, Earthly and Earthly Satellites.
By learning from their experiences, Earthly is poised to serve its users more effectively.
—> Read the original story here, published initially by Earthly’s Founder.
⭐ Star History Weekly Pick
The Star History Weekly Pick is:
LocalStack: “A fully functional local AWS cloud stack. Develop and test your cloud and serverless apps offline.”
⭐️ 49.5k stars reached
💰 Devtools Funding Rounds of The Week
Xano, raised $10M in a Series A funding to help anyone build scalable, world-class software with a no-code platform.
Objective, emerged from stealth today with $13M in venture funding to deliver multimodal search to developers as an API platform.
Fingerprint, a device intelligence API that helps developers build security solutions using information from hardware accessing a website, announced a $33M Series C investment.
ScyllaDB, the platform developing database tech for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, announced that it raised $43M in a funding round.
It’s already over! If you have any comments or feedback, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn or Twitter.
Thanks for reading,
Morgan
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