We, developers, have the ability to create things. And we tend to fall in love with our creations. With the values we embed in them. With the principles we shape them around. With the craft itself. This is one of our greatest strengths. It is also, in the context of business, one of our biggest blind spots.
It manifests in familiar ways. We convince ourselves that technical excellence is a sufficient ingredient for a sale. We spend months on a rewrite that customers never asked for and will never notice. We fail to recognize where the opportunity for capturing value actually lies, or where to set the right boundaries. We pour ourselves into the work and forget that the work also needs to sustain itself.
Marek and I have been there. More than once. And over time, we have learned the discipline of business engineering. How to balance the love of building with the reality that building needs a foundation underneath it. But that learning process came with its own set of lessons, many of them taught by people who saw our builder instincts and thought they could use them.
The pattern
When you are a small company with strong product instincts, people notice. Some of them genuinely want to collaborate. Others see an opportunity to acquire your capabilities without paying what they are worth.
We have experienced this several times over the years, and each time the playbook was different but the underlying dynamic was the same. Someone sees that you can build, sees that you are small, and assumes that you must need saving. Or funding. Or guidance. Or absorption into something bigger. The assumption is always that your size is a weakness rather than a choice.
One time, a company in our space proposed an integration that was really about folding our work into their platform. When we declined, the conversation shifted to suggesting our project belonged in a foundation. In our experience, foundations rarely solve sustainability. They redistribute responsibility while the project slowly loses momentum. No, thank you.
Another time, someone pitched us on selling the project. In the same conversation, they mentioned a similar acquisition that had ended with the acquired project dying. The subtext was not subtle. Open source was a marketing asset. Companies were financial assets. When the acquisition did not work, the offer became a small monthly payment to promote their tools on our channels. No, thank you. Looking back, we are glad we said no. The values we saw play out after that conversation were not ones we wanted to be associated with.
More recently, someone approached us about "joining forces to build something big." It was unclear what that meant in practice because there was no real structure behind the proposal. What became clear quickly was that they saw open source as a detriment to capturing value rather than a multiplier of it. For us, that is a fundamental misalignment. Open source is not something we do despite the business. It is core to how we build it. We passed. We did not even get to specifics because the conversation made it obvious we were building toward very different things.
What we learned
Throughout all of these conversations, a few things became clear.
We have built an impressive product muscle. Four engineers shipping at a pace that companies with forty times our headcount cannot match. This is a real and valuable capability, and it makes some people uncomfortable. When a small team moves faster than a well-funded one, it raises questions that the well-funded one would rather not answer.
You can build an open source business if you capture value in the right places. The code is partially yours, but not all the value lives in the code. The infrastructure, the expertise, the trust, the service. Those are where sustainable businesses are built. We strongly believe the most enduring companies are open ones. But I understand that openness does not matter if your timeline is short and your goal is an exit.
Some founders are here for value creation. Others are here for value extraction. The equation for the latter is straightforward. Get a round to establish a valuation. Get another round to increase it. Exit. Cash out. Repeat. This is a valid path, but it is a different game than the one we are playing. The problem is when people playing that game try to pull you into it because your capabilities would make their numbers look better.
The quiet advantage
Being in a relatively niche corner of the industry has been a gift. It gives us the space to build a technical and product foundation without too much noise, while maintaining a broad perspective on where the industry is heading. We do not jump into whatever everyone else is jumping into. We watch, we think, we build when the timing is right.
The biggest challenge any company faces is staying innovative. Some do not use their own products. Even the ones that do often lack the muscle for real product innovation. It is rare to find product engineers who cross-pollinate ideas across domains. Even rarer to find makers who are passionate and confident enough about their ideas to talk about them openly, make them contagious, and get other people excited to try them. I consider myself that kind of person, and I have learned to protect that quality instead of letting others diminish it.
We are doing business
So thank you to everyone who approached us. Genuinely. Every conversation taught us something. Every "no" made us more confident in what we are building and why. Every attempt to acquire, absorb, or redirect us made us realize how much we love doing this, and how much we have learned about business since we started.
We are doing business, like everyone else. We have our own ideas, our own pace, our own values. It might feel uncomfortable to see a small company with fewer incentives to align with what others expect of us. But we are going to keep making noise and pursuing what we believe in.
It turns out business is not that hard after all. You just need to know what you are building, why you are building it, and who you are building it for. And then you need to be stubborn enough to keep going when people tell you that you should stop.
We are not stopping.