waterisnewcloud

This kind of thinking often promotes confirmation biases.

I worked at Cloudscaling for several years. It seems like this article simplified (actually complicated, read on) the issue too much by truncating it into its two "playbooks." I think the first thing that needs to be argued properly is why open source startups need to be analyzed differently from other startups. If you have a feasible (scalable, sustainable, etc) business model to make money with using open source software - say by deploying it and supporting it - then that business model can be judged by the same criteria as other startup's business models.

The issue of productizing software which several OpenStack companies have attempted is part a basic part of their business requirement for scaling - because supporting dozens of heterogeneous deployments is impossible with reasonably sized engineering & support teams.

This article implies that Cloudscaling used the first playbook. It did do the items listed on the first playbook, but it also did all of the ones on the second playbook too (though, while being a smaller startup didn't contribute as much code back to OpenStack as some of the larger companies/contributors).

Creating new success formulas - like these "playbooks" - ignores what we know to be true about the success of many great startups in our midst. There are patterns behind that success which are consistent. These patterns and factors have been written about extensively by folks like Paul Graham, Eric Schmidt, and the like. They rarely synthesize new complexities or factors when talking about what creates success. What they do is go back to basic principles. However, the data to analyze failed startups well enough to determine which fundamentals were lacking is rarely available - so we make stuff up. Company culture is a big one - and it may or may not have had a significant impact on Cloudscaling.