Matt: Hello everyone. Welcome to another Hacking Open Source Business Podcast.

I am one of the co hosts, the only one on today, Matt Yakubits. And today I am joined by John Robb from the great folks over at React Flow. John, 

John: how you doing? Hey, I'm all right. How about yourself? 

Matt: Pretty good. Now, John and I met for the first time just a few weeks ago in person. Over in Portland at FOSSY.

John: Very far away. Very far away. Yes, because 

Matt: you are right now on the other side of the planet from 

John: Portland. Yes, I'm in Berlin Reactflow there's three of us based in Berlin, one in Bath, in the UK, and yeah, I happen to be over that, on that side of the pond anyway, visiting family, so figured, just a short five hour plane ride across the country but, always a, Reminder that Europe is a little bit smaller than the U.S. So it's not just hopping from one side of the country to the other, but very happy. I went what a great group of people. Yeah very glad I went. 

Matt: John, before we jump into a little bit more on FOSSY. Maybe tell us a little bit about yourself, because you, according to your LinkedIn, are officially an experience manager for ReactFlow.

What is an experience 

John: manager? I don't think it says, I don't think it says experience manager. I think that's a combination of what, my LinkedIn is very inconsistent. So already 

Matt: experience designer, 

John: maybe? Was that it? That's the one, yeah. Because experience designer is the closest thing I have to what I've done in the past and what I've been trained in and that is it's a really vague term of designing that can be anything from designing gatherings for people and creating like curating and crafting moments.

For a group of people. So that can be anything from one time me and two other folks did remote Christmas parties for a few companies. And that's an experience, but also that seems to extend to things in community management which I'm doing more of that flavor stuff at react flow, talking about like, how do we do a town hall meeting or what's the process look like when someone meets, downloads react flow for the first time, what are the next things that happen there?

So it's a very vague term but that's the closest thing I have to if I could put it in a LinkedIn sentence, 

Matt: yes. Okay. So officially I just opened it up. It says you're a human which I think I've verified that in person. But yeah so community management, social media, documentation, strategy, a little bit of code, it says everything.

You, it sounds like you, you not only help, get the community rankle, but you're also doing a little bit of dev rel, because you're talking to conferences, you're talking about the product and just fill it in the gaps as a lot of people 

John: do at startups.

Yeah filling in the gaps is probably the best way to put it. Like the story of how I got hired is that last year. When ReactFlow kinda started getting some subscribers, some people paying for it. The big question on the mind of Moritz and Christopher who started it was like, What do they want from us?

What do they need? Do they want a newsletter every month? Do they need pro examples every week? Are they gonna are they all gonna abandon us? Please don't leave. So then, I was the person coming in and helping with... Everything on that end and that could be from writing a newsletter or figuring out, do we need to write a newsletter at all?

Yeah so pretty much my role is definitely filling in the gaps. The the other three folks are much more from the developer side. Haley also does a bunch of developer relations work and writes blog posts for React flow as well. But I've done things also like from hiring at the company and helping do that piece of the puzzle and all the rest of the kind of stuff that falls between the cracks.

Matt: So in a word, what is React flow for those who don't 

John: know? Yeah. React flow is a tool for developers to build. Interfaces that have boxes and lines, so you can imagine a workflow tool or some sort of logic map. And it turns out that there are thousands and thousands of developers building tools that need to do that sort of layout or not layout, but that display that kind of information in boxes and attached to each other in lines, which we call nodes and edges.

And it's a tool built for the React framework and, yeah, so it's like a visual library is the slightly more. Technical term, 

Matt: so how we get connected was, as we mentioned earlier at FOSSY, you gave a talk specifically about how react flow changed how they were approaching building a sustainable model around their open source.

And, you had coined the term. Thin crust OpenCore model during so what sort of problems did react flow face in and how did you come to this kind of thin crust OpenCore 

John: cool? Yeah, first I would I have unfortunately can't take credit for thin crust OpenCore. I found it in some BCG article but I haven't seen it used anywhere else, which is bizarre because it's so helpful.

And maybe just to say out loud, thin crust, open core. What we mean is like the core. We talk a lot about open core, like you've said it on a bunch of your videos, but then the thin crust piece is like, how do we make sure that paid stuff is tinier than the big stuff in the middle? While a lot of companies end up having huge crust where you're spending 80% of your time building the paid features and.

The free version is a smaller chunk. So and in terms of how we got there was a bit of a bit of luck. Where Moritz and Christopher ended up building this thing and this open source library, and like a lot of lucky open source libraries, people started just using it because it filled this niche need.

They had built it for themselves and turns out other people needed it too. And along the way, like they were doing some agency work on the side, trying to cross fund it, stuff like that. And then they realized what they wanted to be able to just focus on this library as so many other open source software developers would love to do.

And the question was, how the heck do we make money from this thing, even though it's free? And yeah, what they decided was like, let's throw a price tag on it. Offer pro examples as well as a tiny amount of like support for a little extra money. So one hour of support per month. On top is like our kind of extra plan and yeah, people started subscribing.

So we and it worked and it wasn't, so it was out of how do we make sure that we can do this Without having to answer to other folks and have other people making decisions for us. But rather how can we be in control of the direction of this library? And yeah maintain it in the way that they saw as best fit for it and to keep it MIT licensed.

Matt: So what's really interesting is a lot of times open core people when they hear open core, they think of enterprise only features or a watered down open source. Feature set, right? We're going to reserve X, Y, and Z only for our paying customers, and it won't be under a.

Very open license will be under MIT will be under, something that's Apache two. It'll be under something else. And how what's interesting about real clone, how you approach that was you all really focused on adding support and then examples now I haven't, I've seen training and I've seen some other things as part of a.

Subscription offering. But I don't think I've seen examples before as part of that offering, which is a unique thing. And is that something that you found that a lot of your customers do appreciate? And how do you keep up with the examples on a regular basis to keep them 

John: fresh? Cool. Yeah. Super nice question.

So one piece is of that, of it's a multifaceted question. One piece is that there are a lot of people that subscribe for one month, download all the pro examples and unsubscribe the next day. And we're totally fine with that. They are not the people that are sustaining our business as much as the people who are monthly subscribers.

And but for us, that's okay. And we get some money that way. Great. In terms of making sure that we have the fact that you say that it's like unique to the open source world, I guess that is true. I haven't really thought so much about that. But what I. My, my gut feeling here is that the examples are for people who are going to be subscribing over months who are our key metric of, are we doing okay as a business financially or not when they subscribe to, when they have the choice to subscribe to ReactFlow or not.

My imagination is that the examples are this immediate thing that we can get. It's this is the, this is the thing that I get in my hand right now. The one on one support that we offer or prioritize bug fixes and issues, that's like insurance. So I assume that even if some of these companies aren't using any of the pro examples or never reach out to us and contact us because they need help or any of that like pro support.

I have a feeling that those examples really served as that initial hook to bring someone in to say, okay, this is this concrete thing that we get. While if we just said, hey, you can get this one on one support from us, you might need it. And having that alone, although it's valuable, it's just insurance. I don't know if I answered every piece of the question.

Matt: Why wasn't there something else too? Like the watermark is automatically removed. You could remove it in the open source version, but you have to do some work to do it. I think that's another thing that you offer as part of this. 

John: Yeah. So at the beginning I'll fill in like a little bit that we don't talk about it as much in the blog or anything, a blog post about this is that at first we said that Somehow, like on our pricing page, we said to remove the attribution, subscribe, which isn't true.

And that's not like it's not MIT licensed. Okay. Like you can do whatever the heck you want to this. It's MIT licensed. You can sell it again. You could copy all of our code and sell it to someone else. And we said you have to subscribe to remove this. And like internally, yeah, we had a struggle of what if we take that.

If we remove that, are people just going to stop subscribing? But also we don't want to mislead anyone and that's not a fun business. We don't want to be like three hacks just making money because everyone misunderstands open source. So we eventually did take off take that off of our pricing page.

You, the remove attribution is public exactly how to do it. But yeah, we have some text on the docs page and say, Hey, it looks like you're about to remove the attribution. If this is, if you're using it for a commercial use, you're making money from it. This is exactly how to pay us. If you're a student, you're making something open source, go ahead, have fun.

But we do add that point of friction as well as in the code, like where there's the that, that component of this little watermark attribution. We say Hey, here's the link to help us out. Check it out. 

Matt: Yeah. Very cool. And I don't know about your background. Have you heard from other people about.

How they've struggled with kind of, sustaining or monetizing open source. And what have you learned, maybe like exploring some of the other options and some of the other projects that are out there? 

John: Yeah. So I've, I'm pretty new to the open source world, like a year I've jumped into this just a year ago.

And I noticed pretty early okay, there's a lack of funding in a lot of open source projects because it's free. Cool. Okay. That's a problem. And as the year has gone on and like I wrote this article and gave a couple of talks about it, I'm realizing a lot of other people are not only talking about how there's not enough money in open source, but also you are talking about how do we...

Then how do we make sure that those folks get the money that they very well deserve. So I think, and I've seen, once I like wrote that blog post, I had a couple of people that seemed to reach out and be like, Hey on Twitter or something saying this is exactly what I needed, there was someone who reached out that builds a tool called Inc Vadim, and he had this like long list of questions of like, how does this go?

And we had a great conversation over email. And that was, those are those kinds of concrete moments of okay, this, there is, there's individuals who are looking for better ways to do this. And then on a structural level, there's this great article. I'm going to forget who it's by. Oh no.

But about how, like with, That free time is a privileged resource. So then the folks who do have free time are those contributing to open source. And if you don't have free time, then you can't contribute to open source. And since open source is underpaid, you get a less diverse group of people building this infrastructure that we all use.

So that's like the systemic level of why that's important. As, as far as I can tell. But recently I've also been like. Questioning a little bit, like being at FOSSY, I realized a lot of people are saying the same thing. And I'm realizing I'm also coming from the company, a company who's doing it well and things are working out for us.

And I'm interested in what's going to be. I'm interested in what's, if there's something like deeper to talk about, and I don't know what it is yet, like what's the is there something that we need to flip on its head like outside? I don't know. 

Matt: Let's be honest, like from a, commercialization or, sustenance point of view, I think there's multiple levels, right?

So right now, I don't know if you've been following the news, the HashiCorp. Stuff is like blowing up in the open source space as we record this which for those who haven't heard, HashiCorp has decided to move away from an open source license to the BSL, which is a business source license which restricts the use of their software.

And they're doing it for business reasons. And certainly I'm guessing react flow is growing, but I don't think that they're at HashiCorp size yet. No. And I think that there's a lot of open source companies who aren't as well. And so I think there's many more that are smaller.

So when you talk about sustainability for a lot of open source projects, sustainability might be hundreds of thousands of dollars. A year to sustain everything that they need to do. Whereas HashiCorp is looking at 500 million a year. Is what they consider quote, unquote, sustainable or growth. And I think they're even beyond sustainability.

I think there's just that like profitability and shareholder value stage. Which is a very different 

John: stage. I was about to say that's also, I just read the funnily. I was like looking up a little bit about scarf and then found the, what's the person who co hosts this podcast? The founder.

Yeah. I was looking at his post. And the and how the registered article quoted him and stuff. 

Matt: What's funny is he even says he's he's not, he doesn't think it's necessarily a good idea. Yeah. He just appreciates how they handled it. And so now everybody's quoted him as being pro this.

He's the, he's like the more moderate. Everyone else is no, this is horrible. And he's oh, they did it. Okay. Like they handled it as well as they could have doing it. 

John: Well, and one thing here is so maybe this is also something to talk about is like where they, I saw in that article, they talked about now this is no longer defined as open source.

And I've started to think about like how open source. There's a definition of open source, declared by the open source initiative or is that what it is? So now like my question is what's the difference going to be between how they are and how they were before? 

Matt: I think it really boils down to one specific.

Line of the definition, which is non discriminatory. So you're from an open source perspective to meet the open source definition. You have to provide, the software and not put restrictions on it. And so that means that. There have been other licenses over the years, especially recently with like the the advent of morality clauses and things that have been rejected specifically because of that.

Because in a lot of cases, what you'll find is I don't like that. This government is using this open source. So I want to restrict, yes, the government use, or I want to restrict military use, or I want to restrict, X, Y, or Z. And part of that kind of freedom that was originally divine designed as open source was you can't do that.

And so this is where the shift is by leaving it open like that, you enable other people to monetize it. And at a certain point, that's okay. But as you grow, I think there is a definitely a difference of opinions. On what is the ultimate outcome of a company? And I've written about this in linked in on a few different people's threads.

I really think that in the case of some of these big companies switching licenses, they're switching not because necessarily that it's. Going to protect the business they have. They're looking to capture business that don't have. And, so from an open source perspective most people don't want to pay for open source if they can avoid it.

And I'm guessing this is your experience at React Flow. You probably have a hundred times more downloads than you have customers. Maybe a thousand 

John: times. Yes. And for us, that's okay. Yeah. That's because we're tiny too. to say, if. I don't even know what percentage it must be. It's low, whatever it is.

Oh yeah. Yeah. Typically, 

Matt: So typically you're looking at less than 5% of the overall family. So probably even way less than that. Yeah. And if you're best in the world, like you're talking 5%, and that would be ridiculously happy for most people. But I think with the cloud providers coming in, what they've done has been able to sell people something that they do want.

Which, quite honestly. People don't want to have to run the software or run the infrastructure to support the software. So if you run that as a service, people are like, that's awesome. I don't have to worry about it. It's still open source. So yay. But they're not paying for the software.

They're paying for the service. And I think a lot of open source companies in the past have banked on people buying the open source or paying for a subscription to support or whatever. Which isn't necessarily needed in the as a server space. So how do you capture that as a lot of these changes. 

John: Yeah, I hear that.

For sure. For sure. 

Matt: Yeah. 

John: It's crazy though. It's crazy times. It's crazy. It's crazy times. Crazy times. Yeah, but it's also, it's going back to the point about the ethical licenses too, like that's something that's been on my mind recently. Cause to be honest, like we've gotten a few subscriptions from companies that we do not want to support.

And so we were for our subscription is actually, it's not like a business DSL or anything it's through a terms of use. So all of our like pro platform stuff, we add an ethical agreement. And if there's a company that like, we wouldn't feel comfortable working with then we say, Hey, doesn't fit, sorry, go, but the thing is then they can still use the free software and it's this, but the ethical open source licenses, like we, as soon as we implement that, we're no longer open source, technically, according to the open source initiative. And that always just has me question what then what's the definition for.

And I guess it's yeah, that I've struggled with that a little bit to, because I think also I've become a little bit disenchanted with the open source world since coming in a year ago, because at first coming in, especially talking to friends about it who aren't necessarily in tech or people that are just like I don't know, in UX or something where I came from.

I say, Hey, I'm working on this open source software. Oh, that's so good. That's so important. Like we need more people working on open source. And I'm thinking like, Hey, a weapons company probably uses our stuff. Because they tried to subscribe and they probably just used the free version, someone that's doing mass surveillance is probably using our stuff right now.

I know that a lot of the principles of open source are super healthy I, flexible, it's this flexibility, this radical transparency that the world needs way more of and, like, when we get into, when we're talking about this Thin line drawn by the open source initiative.

It rubs me the wrong way. I don't know. I 

Matt: mean, I guess it's the same, it works both ways though. And I think that this is where a lot of folks don't realize that is, with this non discriminatory, approach, it's look, this is freely available and we don't necessarily support these initiatives.

Like you said, we're not going to take money from these companies. Yep. That's cool. And that is completely legitimate. You know that there's nothing that says in open source, you have to provide services for this. But from a software perspective, if you want to benefit and live in this freely available, space.

There are the pros and cons, and I'll use a very political example, whether you are on, on, on the very extreme right or the very extreme left or somewhere in the middle. Imagine that, someone decides to say this software is not available for the opposite of that political spectrum.

So yeah, one of the things is you could have a license that is even against something like the L G B T Q community, right? So you have it. So it is very negative towards one community, which is totally outrageous. You wouldn't want that to have happened. So if you can outlaw, Hey, if you're in this, space or this business, you could outlaw social groups or, entire movements or demographics, or even people who are specific races or ethnicities.

And I think that's wrong if you're saying like, oh I want to restrict from weapons manufacturers, then do the opposite people who think. Hey, these are bad things for us. Would they be allowed to create licenses and still call that open source? And it's a slippery slope there because if you start to restrict some, then you restrict others and it's the good intention sometimes comes back to bite you.

And I would hate to see that because I think that the broader the ecosystem, the better it is. I won't support certain conferences. I won't support certain initiatives. I won't support certain applications that I don't believe in them, but I also don't discriminate in their right to, publish these as open source and make them freely available to

John: everyone. Yeah. Yeah. It's a 

Matt: weird thing. John? Like 

John: it is it's a, it is weird. And you like, maybe if you're listening to it as a podcast, I'm like staring off into the white wall of the office of ah where it's. This level of yeah. And me and that's like a, I don't know how, yeah, I don't have any answers for that.

Matt: That's yeah. And I don't think there is a good answer. But I don't think that let's be honest, these new licenses that have cropped up are not specifically for those moral or ethical. Or religious type reasons, 

John: right? So the one that I know of is the Hippocratic license. That's done by the ethical open source group and a few others.

And I think, yeah, the group that the person who did the original oh gosh, I'm all the words are going out of my brain. Anyway, the Hippocratic license 3. 0, like the. Do no harm. dev, I think it is there. It seems like there, people are starting to do like good work there. And we took that for our own terms of service and they're like referring to the United nations bill of human rights.

And it's okay, like that's something we can all get behind is no murder. Fine. Like I'm in. Oh, no. Yeah. 

Matt: And I'm not saying that these are necessarily bad. I'm saying that you could call it something else. So ethical software, ethical, even ethical open source I think that the term open source has been expanded to mean a lot of different things.

And I think that there are some, tent poles, which includes that non discriminatory. If you wanted to say, Hey, this is released under the free software, ethical license, or whatever you want to call it, I think that works. But I think what we've seen is that term open source be hijacked over and over again, and you've seen it evolve over the last 10 years where, it started off meaning something very specific and everyone's tried to morph it because.

There's power in the name and the term open source. Oh, a hundred 

John: percent. Very much. And, 

Matt: and I think that right now with these current licenses that we are talking through and we are working, with, that there's, they still try to hook into that open. A lot of them say we're open or, we're committed to open software code or, open code or whatever.

And so they try to massage the language a little bit more, but I'm going to be honest with you. Like most of the, I think like. When I talk with people, there is actually a relatively small number of users who use open source and rely on open source and care about open source who actually read the code and who actually spend time in the source.

They're choosing it because it's freely available. They're choosing it because it's easy to use. They're choosing it because it has a community behind it, right? That doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to get involved in either contributing code or reading code or in a lot of cases. They won't even know the programming language, when you talk about like databases, which I'm familiar with, most of the developers who are using it aren't C developers.

John: Sure. And this is where yeah, open source is so broad too. Cause talking about react flow, even like the, do you know, like the cathedral versus the bizarre style of development? Like we are very much on the cathedral end of development. Like we are a group of four core members who are getting paid.

And we. Do a bulk of the work and like we get to use that and I don't think I'm disagreeing or agreeing. It's just it's such a wild world where we get to use this word open source. And, but in a lot of ways, like other folks don't contribute we do leave the door open. We have instructions on how you can contribute, but it doesn't happen nearly as much probably because we've closed the door in a way.

But we do get to benefit a lot from having this open source. designation behind our name. And also we've, I think I've heard like there's another company based in Berlin that is, has changed, switched from open source to source available because they realized that it took so much time to go through all the issues and all the pull requests that people were making.

And then they lose the, but they lost that, those words, and I think they were going for investor rounds and stuff, or they've gotten investment now and it sounds like if someone wants to go on that path, having the words open source behind it may be important as well just amazing how much power is in that word and I think maybe I saw it on your Twitter feed or something, like this term openwashing, I've never heard before, of oh yeah, like how to fold, how do we start using this word in order to like, push our own 

Matt: well, and I think that this is where a lot of like the recent changes that we've seen, and it's a relatively small number of companies, but it's growing.

But it often comes in for business reasons, not ethical or moral kind of reasons. It's for a business reason, and ultimately the bigger problem isn't necessarily the switch. It's the change in commitment to the community because for many people, when you hear the term open source when you start to use open source, there's some things that go on your mind wrong or different.

Number one, that it's. The source is available. If the company goes away, the community will help. And it's still around to support it. You don't have to pay for it unless there's some compelling reason. You can go in and fix or alter things if you need to. And you do have certain freedoms and rights to it.

I think that regardless of like what software you're using, you think that way and what someone comes along and says for a business decision, we're going to. Take a step back from that. They peel back some of those freedoms that you had or what you would consider rights that might be, available to you.

And ultimately, whoever controls the IP controls, the destiny, it's the whole dune thing, right? He who controls the spice controls the universe. It's he who controls the IP in a lot of cases, because they can change that license. And this is where a lot of foundations have tried to.

Step in and some companies have gone to the mat and said, we're going to donate this project to this foundation. Therefore we, you have some guarantees. And so that's one way that you can get that kind of comfort level in a project to say Oh yeah, this is, this project is, might be commercialized by this company, but the foundation is the one who really maintains it and owns the underlying.

Property 

John: that's yeah and that kind of, yeah, I I got lost the train left the station. I had something to say. 

Matt: Oh, that's okay. Yeah, but it is this really like fast. I think this is where I think we get tied up because there's. There's lots of things. This is an onion where you peel layers off of this onion, right?

And part of this is when we think about the layers that we're talking about in this case, a lot of the businesses that. Are the size of react flow or a lot of the businesses in the open source space, the size of scarf or the size of, other companies in this open source space, there are a lot of companies in this space who aren't going to necessarily have the same benefits or the same needs or desires that these bigger companies that are switching licenses have, because again, that, that level of sustainability that we're looking to achieve is an order of magnitude different.

But. Yeah. If we're just using open source right now at this stage is a stepping stone to get us to that next stage. And then we'll toss out the licenses later on when they're not convenient. That's where I have a big problem, right? And so that's where we have to be careful as a community to, not only be certain of what we're trying to do, but be careful that this kind of let's start as open and then throw away all of those licenses.

Those restrictions later on when they're inconvenient, if that becomes the standard operating procedure, that's going to be a bad thing for the community 

John: as a whole. And yeah, very much agreed. And I think and that's also from our side, we make it super clear on our website and stuff.

Like we're, we are going to stay MIT licensed forever where, but the thing is it's a promise and that's all we can give like. I, we have the ability and the permission to flip a switch and say it's proprietary now, and we're going to continue working on it behind closed doors. We won't like I'm, I, we're, this is something that we've really cared about at the core of our company.

And that's a big piece of our values. Like from when Christopher and Moritz were working together for a long time before this is how important open sources was to all their work before. And but the thing is, it's so strange. Cause it's just a promise. That this is how we're going to work and there, there's nothing that anyone can really do about that.

And even internally, I think it's been it's really like a question of how do we make sure that we stay at that level where we want to keep our MIT license, where that's the thing that's still important to us. And I imagine as and that's for us at Reactflow also where we find.

For us, it's important that we don't get investor money at the that's not our way to go. Cause as soon as that happens as well, then like motives change, total changes, money is different. Like as soon as a stakeholder with a huge percentage says, Hey, you shouldn't be open source anymore. Because X, Y, Z, you'll get this much more money convince me otherwise.

Then you don't really have a chance to say, no, this is according to our values. So yeah, for us that's a big question and something that I think about is like how to make sure that not only that giving the promise of how do we keep our stuff MIT licensed, but how do we keep ourselves in a place like mentally and on our daily work and as a team where we want to keep it open source and that's easy.

Like, how do we make it easiest for us to keep this open source and keep it MIT licensed? 

Matt: Yeah. And on top of it. Not only keep it that, but also be able to pay people's salaries and be able to pay for the, the resources you need to actually support the development work you're doing. I think that's where, there are options.

It's just that the scale changes. 

John: Yeah, that's another funny thing is we're doing fine financially. And we we're actually just talking about having a new hire, like starting in the next month. Amazing. Like we're going to be, five, five people some working part time some and that's so nice.

And we're sustaining ourselves just on like this library and those pro subscribers. And if we did talk about oh, we want to double there's some companies. At some point you just say, we want to double our employees. I don't know why they say that. But that's just exciting, and if we wanted to say that, then we'd have to think of an entirely new business model, I think, because it's like pro subscribers, like we talked about earlier, it's such a small percentage of the number of people. But with a small group of people working on software. It's enough for us, but as soon as you talk about scaling, to 200% or whatever, the business model just breaks.

Yeah, and I find that really interesting that like a small company doing this stuff can survive as long as you don't grow. Too fast, too big. And a lot of the, at least I'm coming also from the big tech world. Like I was a contractor at Google for a year and there's this excitement of like, how do we get big numbers?

And like, how do we get more users? How do we get more bigger team, bigger budget, stuff like that. And as soon as you ignore that, then funny opportunities arise to just enjoy working. 

Matt: I'm going to misquote this and I don't even remember where I heard it, but I might've read it somewhere.

I might've heard it on an audio book. I don't know. So I apologize. Misquoting, but there's this story about. This fisherman who sells fish, like fish tacos, at a South American destination, like a vacation spot and, someone from the U. S. comes down with big money and he's tacos.

Oh, this is great. This is great. And, tells him, hey if I invest, we could really work hard to, make this into something that's great. We can have it be something where we've got chains around the world. And, if we put in, all this time, this effort and this money that, we'll eventually be able to grow this to 10 times the size.

After, 10, 15 years, you'll be able to have enough money where you can, do whatever you want, what do you want to do? The guy's I just want to. Spend time fishing, spend time with my family, and enjoy life. And we'll just think about this after 10, 20 years, you can do that.

And it's I can do that now. Great. I just go fish. I feel like fish. I come sell them and then I go home and spend time with my family. So why do I need to do 10 times the size? Yeah. And I think that's, yeah it's apropos, right? Because I think a lot of times we get so caught up in this growth cycle.

That, we can't be happy with, Hey, we grew 20%, we grew 30%, we grew 40%, it's like, how do we triple, double, quadruple, right? And sometimes it's just that there needs to be tempered expectations, but small, steady growth and making sure that it's sustainable is sometimes 

John: better.

Yeah, a hundred percent agreed. And there's like a lot of good work being done on this and economics of the donut economics, if you've heard of that, or like just, there's a bunch of books on degrowth now that are really interesting of like, how do we actually shrink the economy? Maybe it's healthy and we can be happier and and yeah, that kind of level of what.

Yeah, questioning ourselves a little bit when we talk about how do we grow and asking the question, why after that, because there is, there's definitely a societal piece of getting bigger, better, faster, stronger is is a better thing. And. Yeah, to question that like fundamental truth within startups and tech is I think something that a lot, like I'm still figuring it out.

I think. And I think a lot of people are too, and some people aren't aware yet. And I hope some more people become aware. 

Matt: And don't get me wrong. If you can achieve, this growth and you can help more people and, then that's great. I'm not saying you shouldn't just grow there are pathways that you can do.

And there are companies that just take off like a rocket because they've got such an awesome product, such an awesome ecosystem. And there's such demand for it. And I'm not saying that you shouldn't tap into that, but I think that sometimes we lose the force through the trees. 

John: Yes. Yeah. Growth for the sake of growth doesn't make sense.

I I think one, one thing that I always like to say is let's build things that are useful. And then sometimes let's not build anything at all. When we don't have something useful to build and or something that's fun or brings us joy or something, then let's just, we just don't have to.

And that's okay. Like the world is fine with one less thing. And, yeah and also, yeah, like you said, there at FOSSY, when we were at FOSSY there was Outreachy was there. And they gave... I loved listening to that keynote just about how they've been growing to, what is it, a thousand folks that have gone through the Outreachy program and it sounds like they're having a great time doing it and it's.

Yeah, like money is getting put into places where it should be. People are giving being given opportunities where they may not have been before, where they should have access to them. Yes. Please grow. How can I help? Awesome. So that's always heartwarming to see growth where in stuff like that for me.

Matt: John, that's a great note to end on. So I think that's a great sentiment, John. I want to thank you for hanging out with me today and talk to me a little bit about react flow and talking a little about licensing and, growth and everything else in the open source space. Yes, 

John: absolutely.

Thanks for having me on. Wonderful to talk to you. Hey, I'm glad we got to talk here. We didn't get much chance at FOSSY. So super nice to talk. 

Matt: All right. And if you're interested in learning more about React Flow, check out the website. We'll drop a link in the description here. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and until next time, we'll see you later.