Nick Tomaino is an early stage investor at Runa Capital and a former business development specialist at blockchain startup Coinbase. In this op-ed, Tomaino highlights how open-source developers have been incentivized historically and how this colors the ongoing discussion about applying blockchain-based ‘crypto-tokens’ to this use case. Spurred by Union Square Ventures partner Albert Wenger’s recent blog post , there’s been lots of discussion about crypto-tokens in recent week. This has led to excitement and skepticism about their ability to incentivize open-source developers to create and maintain protocols. However, as Runa Capital has funded a number of developers who have created and maintained thriving open-source protocols, I wanted to shine some light on this approach in the context of how open-source developers have been incentivized historically. This article focuses on both why a crypto-token issuance may make sense for some, and why it might not make sense for others who are served well by existing business models. Nginx Nginx is open-source server software used by more than 30% of websites on the Internet, and we were the first money into NGINX Software, Inc – the company that commercialized that project. But when we invested, Nginx creator Igor Sysoev was a brilliant developer that didn’t have any experience running a business. We helped Igor and team put together a business strategy, hire a sales and operations team, and grow the business. Now, Nginx is a thriving company with millions of dollars in revenue and a growing suite of products. The company monetizes by providing professional services, as well as premium products including a load-balancer that has been widely adopted by many of its open-source users. MySQL MySQL is open-source database software widely used by enterprises and developers globally. We were also early investors in MySQL creator Michael "Monty" Widenius and […]
