I think it's fine, I can start, I think we can always cut the video, it's okay to start.
Yes, but do we do an introduction?
No, no, I said it's okay.
So, hello, I'm Ludwig Dubas, I'm the founder and CEO of XWiki, SIS, XWiki is a company, I found
that company and say a bit more about myself.
So, before I actually working on XWiki, I've been working with internet technologies
in 1995, I worked at Netscape, so I have a good knowledge also of American companies
and also what it means to compete with Microsoft.
Netscape had a really big, big fight at some point with Microsoft.
Then I worked in a French startup that was doing audience measurement.
That was acquired by Neil Sennet ratings.
And then after that, I decided to create XWiki.
As I was a long time, I was a weak user in my previous companies and I found it really
extremely useful for knowledge management.
And I had a big passion for making people share knowledge and be efficient and work
with very flat organization and that's how I created XWiki.
Practically, I do prefer to build open source.
Then actually tell people that they sure or things like that.
But in the end, I end up doing significant talks or lobbying and explaining why open source
should be great and why we should do it, why government should do it, more et cetera.
But sometimes we kind of prefer to go back and actually doing this stuff.
Then saying that it should be done.
But I also like very much to do talks to share our experience.
How it worked and what were the difficulties so that it can be useful for creating more
companies or more projects and stuff like that.
I'm also a member of a few organizations in France and at European level.
But also I'm a member of the board of open source tracks.
If you don't know open source tracks, go see what they do and help them.
They always need money.
I also am a very small investor in Mopena.
The mobile phone with the EOS of complete open source Android.
So XWiki is a French and European company.
We're self-funded so we have no investors.
Just some employees put some money at the beginning.
We're doing like about 6.5 million revenue for the last year.
So it's not yet the accounting revenue is what we sold in the year.
And we actually did 50% growth two years in a row.
So we have a good trend right now.
We have 65 people, mostly in France and Romania.
But we have also people in other countries.
And we do two softwares.
One is a tricky.
The main one and quick pad is actually a second project.
We started inside and it's much smaller.
It's nine people.
And it's it's under the bit differently.
So that gives us also a bit of a different view on on what it means to to fund open source.
I'm quite engaged in digital sovereignty.
Like trying to free ourselves from running softwares,
like Microsoft, everyone, all the companies.
And we're happy with XWiki to be one piece of what is needed to actually get us free a bit more free on this thing.
We're basically have a traditional software company business model.
And that includes everything including service.
Actually I'll talk about that more.
The how the share of service and support and all I think that basically we provide the support of the software.
And consulting, hosting, SaaS, like 50 much like any traditional software company.
And but also service has been something important I'll mention it.
So I was thinking how did it start.
But actually it's like five years how it started.
It took a lot of time to pick up.
So it's a long story so 20 for the company.
So and so the first thing is.
But how do you do software like I was really convinced we should do open software.
But how do you fund it?
So the thing is okay, you can be a billionaires and spend your money.
I was not.
So I said okay, how can I do it?
And then the different ways of launching the funding of companies.
So you can fund with crypto money sometimes.
So some people have done that.
Like okay, we're going to create a token.
We get some money and we can build some software.
We can raise money as a startup.
I can just be a volunteer or I can take donations.
Or I can be a company selling service or product.
So and I try to kind of say okay, what does it change in your life.
So and how much and how independent are you.
Can you do really more flaws, more open source.
How sustainable are you and how nice it is.
So if you raise money, it's quite cool at the beginning.
Like you raise money.
You have money.
You can build a lot of stuff.
But in the end, you probably did long over the long term.
Because the VCs are going to take your company.
So so it's it's a trade of that is always difficult.
So one of the things I say is that there is no bad open source.
Any good, any code that is open source that is provided is good.
So even Vc funded open source is good for open source.
It brings more code.
But we should be a bit like not be naive about what it means.
And what the changes can be over the long term.
And so now my take is that you should do what you feel right with.
The right model for you is what you feel good at.
What you feel comfortable with.
And I felt comfortable being more independent.
So so the thing with investors is actually knowing what it means.
What is the boss in the end.
And I as a founder, I wanted to be able to tell my employees.
You know, this is what we want to do.
And I want potentially say this is the plan.
I want to promise this for the future.
And the thing is if you take investors from my point of view,
you cannot hold these promises.
Because at some point you won't have the power.
There's a very high chance that you won't have the power.
And so this is probably one of the biggest reasons why on my side.
It said, okay, maybe it's that idea to take investors.
We talk to investors.
But whenever we spoke, I felt that the goals were not the same about what we're trying to do.
And for me, money is a mean not to go.
So we need to make money.
If we don't have money, we cannot work.
So there is one thing in open source in general.
That is speaking about money is the time that that word.
And that shouldn't be the case.
Because we need money.
We cannot have money to do work.
We need money to do good work.
Good engineers deserve to be paid well.
Other companies are paying them a lot.
Maybe you can pay them a lot less than what the big companies do.
But you cannot meet completely of the charts and say,
You're going to do everything for free.
That doesn't work.
So the money we need it, but it's not the goal.
So it should be thought about how,
I mean, what is the real goal?
And think regularly about what the real goal is.
So the first five years was a lot about leveraging the open source community.
So because actually when you started doing the software,
there was a lot of feedback.
And actually open source is great for that.
When you start a product and people find it interesting,
you have a lot of help.
A lot of people did your feedback or they make it known.
And that's actually one of the reasons VCE companies are going to open sources.
That's a great way to launch products.
They go away because over the long term, once they are known,
they don't benefit that much from this aspect.
But so initially you get a lot of help and that's really very useful.
And so service was a great way also to start small.
So you're just a small team.
People ask you to do stuff on top of the software.
You do it and you make it a little bit more money.
You improve the software underway and progressively do it.
But I call it a hack because it's not a good thing over the long term.
Like too much service is not so good for working on the maintenance of the software.
It scales much less.
So it's very difficult to grow.
It was too much service.
We also went to Romania.
And so I called it also hack because we kind of went because it was cheaper.
And I could have three engineers instead of one.
If I went to Romania, which is probably not true.
It's not true anymore.
It's much closer.
And now we're super happy to be in Romania.
It's great engineers.
But we never really did up for.
For me, what was really important is that they're part of the team.
So they need to be involved in the company.
And so we have Romanian in the company at the same way that they would be French or German.
And they can take responsibility.
And so one of the aspects was also innovation.
It helped to have something innovative.
So one of the, so you actually when you do open source sometimes you,
you can do just a replacement of something that exists.
So you're a copycat in a sense.
Like, oh, I'm going to replace this proprietary software.
But you can also be innovative and actually weakies.
The way or maybe they are not anymore because they're super known.
But they were innovative.
They're innovative for companies.
It's a different way of working.
So that innovation can help you find clients.
So innovation.
And then you can address people in company that are interested by innovation.
At the beginning of it, it helped a lot to get somebody.
There was also.
So that's very specific to France and France.
You'll have something called the Canadian power chest.
This is basically a tax cut for research.
And that also helped help a lot.
We didn't do it right away at the beginning.
But we did it after two or three years.
And it helped reduce the costs and being able to invest.
But a lot of patients.
So actually if you look the revenue of the first five years.
It's going to help like that.
So I'm not going to comment too much all the details in the trials.
If you look at the slides later, you can try to study them there for that.
It's looking at what are the share of the different types of revenue.
So you have a research revenue.
You have the Canadian power chest.
This is a tax cut that we get in France.
But and then you had mostly service.
The yellow stuff is really the big part of service.
And it took a lot of time to get recurrent revenue.
So what I call recurrent revenue is support.
It's getting people to pay yearly for the software.
And so mostly initially it was linked to the service.
So we do a service project and you would sell the support.
This is actually one of the reason we didn't really manage to partner much
with other companies because if we partnered and we let the service to other people,
they would never sell the support.
They would never bring the support back to us.
They would bring a very, very small amount of support potentially.
And in the end, we would never be able to have sufficient engineer to really improve the product.
Because you need to make a good product and it takes a lot of time.
So I mean, you can have other models.
And for example, what you presented, there was a turning from organization that said,
okay, we want the software.
So we're going to pay for it.
So they can be other things.
But we really went to find people that wanted the software.
And some of them funded it.
But the problem is how you transform this to recurrent revenue.
But we always had it in mind that we need to transform to support.
Always had a model always said we're going to sell,
we're going to have support support support.
On the way also, it was very important for us to create values for the company.
So and what does it mean?
And so we need to be a product-centered company.
It's very important.
When not a service company, you were a product company.
And so we want people to be happy.
And what we work on is really important.
And what I want to mention is that having a good product is super important.
Sometimes people blame the business model for the reason it doesn't work.
But verify how good the product is compared to the market.
I mean, what's called product market fit like does the product.
Is it something that people actually want?
Is it something that they actually ready to pay for?
Sometimes they're ready to use it, but they're not ready to pay for it.
So and what is the competition?
In our life, we had moments where it was really difficult with the competition.
The other software was just better.
I mean, we can blame the fact that we didn't have enough money to make a better software.
But the fact in the end is that if the other software better,
users will go for the other software.
So sometimes look at it and when we had difficulties,
one of the things we need to go back to the software
and make it better.
And so it was not just, oh, let's change the business model.
Let's blame open source as a bad business model.
So one thing is I mentioned it's support revenue is key.
So now over the next five years,
we grew progressively the recurring revenue and also the service revenue.
So the company went to 2 million revenue,
but the recurring revenue went to 800k here.
And with that, we can start to have a team that is regularly working.
One thing I think is that we separated the product steam
that are so that they're really being able to focus on the product
and the service team, which goal is to really serve the clients.
But that doesn't mean actually that the service team never does open source.
They actually created a lot of modules that were kind of extensions
and prototypes of first modules of something that would become much more important
in the product in the future.
So they would also serve as an innovation lab.
And the fact that software is open source actually helps a lot
because nothing stops the service team to work directly on the product.
Which is actually very difficult to the proprietary software company.
So it's a big advantage to be an open source company
because you can talk to your own team.
And I've seen and provided a company that the client team
cannot even ask the product team to add a feature.
It might not work at all.
No way.
So we also did some things.
We tried to do very, very applications.
So like there was a quarter of tweaking.
So let's make a workspace.
So that's going to add some different type of feature for different use cases.
Let's make a wiki.
Let's make a wiki for gathering information
from the internet using RSS feeds.
So we call it a clicky watch.
It would bring stuff for using RSS feeds
and do what is called a competitive watching of your competitors.
The problem of that is that it did bring us a bit of clients
but in the end it made us diverge.
Like do too many things at the same time.
And in the end we always kind of came back
to trying to have only one product.
So really one product on a clicky.
Prepare for me a completely different business.
It's a different team.
So we always came back because one of the things is that for the customers
it needs to be simple.
Like if there's too many offerings, customers don't really know which one to buy.
And we also did our first clicky cloud.
And this one failed was not well enough.
And it was not to well connected with the rest of the offering.
We start to have some extensions.
But everything was free.
And now I'll come back to that and that's really important in what we do.
So on the final side that's how we continue to go.
So pretty much continuing very regularly.
So one of the things and this is very typical from the service business model.
It's safe, but it's pretty much flat.
It doesn't accelerate.
So that's a bit difficult.
But it was going up.
And now we also learn that competition can be tough.
So our big competitor has always been at last and confidence.
So now we compete also with notion that is getting more tracking.
That we got a lot of competition for that last year.
And one of the things is that a thousand conference was not very extensive.
So Microsoft was a bit more expensive as a software.
And like pay per user a lot.
But that last year had the aggressive pricing.
So if you had more users, you would pay a bit less per user.
The initial prices would be quite low.
Like you could get an instance for 3K for 50 years.
And it was not so expensive.
And so we didn't have a lot of room to position ourselves on the price aspect.
And so then of course, you just need to be better.
But I mean this means a lot.
Like how you position against the competition.
If there is no competition, then you're a good offering.
If there is a competition based very expensive, there is a lot of people that are going to not be able.
Or not ready to pay that.
And so you're going to have an entry in the market.
So that ended up with such a challenging period.
And it transformed into something very flat for a couple more years.
And so the product revenue, we had really difficult to grow it.
We had difficulties too.
And so we kind of blamed the business model at the time.
And one of the things that, oh, maybe we should have a pro package.
That is a difference.
So that's a lot of what we see companies are doing.
And then to price package and a community package.
And the more time passes.
Because like that at the beginning, it's very, it's the same.
And all the value goes in the pro package.
And there is less and new value in the community package.
So at some point there, maybe you should do that and have this pro package.
Actually it is failed for us like big time.
It broke down our leads.
Because people didn't want the pro package.
What made us known on the internet was the open source package.
So all was going to the open source website with the community website.
And actually, we had a system where on the community website,
we were not asking, we're not taking too many emails and stuff like that.
In the product, we were not taking people's emails.
We're still doing it.
We took them on the website, but on the company website,
not on the open source website.
And so people, they didn't find the package they wanted.
They went to the other side.
And we didn't receive leads anymore.
We didn't have people to call.
And actually, one of the things that is magic with open source is that you put your software there.
And you say, okay, tell me where you are, what you like it, what you're interested in.
These are people that call you.
And actually tell me why they want your software.
Sometimes actually, I just want this from you.
Can you sell it to me?
Actually, not so difficult to sell.
If the software is right, if the value is right, people want your software.
So they ask you, and the sales costs are really low.
And I take tricky, I think we have a pretty thin layer of sales and marketing.
Thanks to open source.
And that's a big value.
So basically, at that point, what we are, like open source is not free.
And we also need to participate to explain that to customers.
So the thing is, oh, we have this open packages free.
But people take it and it takes time for them to decide that they would take support.
So they do take support after a while, but it takes time.
Like the software needs to be critical.
My take is that if the software is super important in a company, companies will pay for it.
That's not a problem.
The problem is that the time it takes for them to decide that it's critical.
And that it's not just a gadget, what you're providing to them or something that's a small team wants.
So how critical it is to the organizations that is using it.
And so that was a big difficulty.
And so, but they also, sometimes, at the moment, they use it for a while.
And then say, okay, it becomes critical.
But okay, do I really need to pay?
Am I obliged to pay?
And what's the rule?
And what's the value?
But it works, the software, why do I need to support?
And we all want to do software that works.
We don't want to do buggy software so that people call us to buy support.
It doesn't make any sense.
And that's not what we want to do.
And so that's actually one of the challenges.
If you do bugs, so if you do a lot of bugs, you might have more sales goals.
But you will also have much less diffusion on the internet.
And your software will not skyrocket because a lot of people will think this software scrap.
So it's kind of a chicken and egg and a plum.
It doesn't really work.
So what we did and say, we did a big decision at the time.
This is a time when we re-sought that it first we need to work back on the product.
Work a lot on the product.
So we reinvested on the product.
I took back time on the product.
That was working a lot with clients and clients and whatever.
But I said, okay, now I need to go back and say, how is our product,
actually, like by the market, what should be better in the product.
So I went back a bit to work on that personally with other people.
We did some task courses and another thing that we did is, okay,
what should we actually change in the business model in the way we did?
And one of the things we decided is that first we should really base our company on the open source product.
So and have a link between how you transform people from the open source users
to actually people that contribute, that pay for us for the work,
without necessarily needing the service.
And so you could say, let's do open core.
Let's do open core.
But we really didn't want to do that.
And we think that doing open core at some point means you're not doing open source anymore.
But we did something that's actually not that common is we have zero open core.
That's actually key.
Everything's open source.
But you have a lot of modules that are paying.
You have to pay for that.
But everything is open source.
You have the code on the repository.
So we have an app store in the, in the, in the tricky software.
You can search for extensions.
Some extensions are called pro.
That doesn't mean they're not open source.
It means they're paying.
If you want the source, if you're a hacker and you want to use them for free,
be my guest.
Do it.
You will have to, if you're a company, you will have to do it for every minute or
every minute releases.
You will have to remove the license check or these things.
And actually companies don't do that.
So for the clients, it's actually, they, they just, for them.
It's, I mean, they're not, they, a lot of times don't really care about open source.
Sometimes they serve and source as this free thing that's beneficial.
But they didn't really care about the fact that it's open source.
If the product has value, they'll pay for it.
Just that if they have no reason to pay, they won't.
So this gives them a reason to pay.
So they find active directory extension.
Actually, we have LDAP and XWiki and active directory.
LDAP, if you search that documentation, you'll find how to do it yourself.
And it's going to be free.
Active directory Microsoft.
You search in the app store and it's paying module.
Which helps you to configure it and you pay for it.
We, a lot of people pay for it.
Azure Connector, Google Apps, Google Connector,
is up paying modules and XWiki.
So we, we started doing that.
And this, we, so we have selling a few of them, a certain amount.
That they pay?
Well, it's actually complicated to go build yourself.
So the app store is just, you get it.
You click it and you have 30 days trial, et cetera.
So using it for free is you would need to dive in the technical aspects.
So the biggest risk is not the customer do it.
The biggest risk would be another service company doing it.
Okay?
Like somebody thinks that XWiki is so great that they, they should give it for free.
Or they want to sell it to other kinds without giving us money.
Then they can do that.
But my take as a company is that if we get to that moment,
it means actually XWiki is going to be so popular that it's not going to be a problem for us to live.
I need to speed up sorry.
We launched a good part.
So how, this is how we did a big combat.
So we build this business model.
But then what happened is we got a gift from a class and they raised their price like crazy.
And they said go to the cloud everybody.
And so this really helped us because a lot of people started calling in.
They said I want to migrate.
I want to stay on them is.
And so we started doing much more business.
So I'm doing, I'm taking way more time.
So the second thing is that digital sovereignty became a strong subject.
With COVID, Europe also started realizing that there's a lot of dependencies that Europe has.
And it acknowledges one of them.
Microsoft is also continuing to raise a price.
So the cloud cloud has always been thin as this great benefit that is going to be cheap.
But this, this is just a, for a short time.
Like it creates huge dependency for users to the cloud services.
And the companies that are running cloud services have poor investment money.
But then they want to get this money back.
And they have a whole lot of power because they have all your data.
And if you want to leave your, you have my tomorrow, your service is down.
If you don't pay 20% more.
And you know what I, what do you do?
Before it was at your next year or two year renewal,
you're going to have a price increase for the software that you have on premise.
So you could, you would have a certain amount of time to do your renewal.
You could decide not to upgrade to the latest version of the software and stay on the old version for a while.
On the cloud, you can do that.
So the power of the software company is actually huge.
And they actually use it because they need to pay back or the investment that they did.
And so Europe is also measuring this dependency against, against the, the big text.
And is is is is investing money. So we are, we have the chance to be part of the,
the companies that are participating to a German code project code.
Open that with people like next cloud element, collaborate.
And so and we collaborate and we help each other.
And that is also helping a lot increase our business.
And this is what's happening.
So, so and so by the way, all these numbers are extremely plus crypto.
So crypto also raised that actually crypto is 600k in there.
So you can see it's 10% crypto.
It's actually quite small.
But it's also growing itself, but in a different way.
But it's really growing with client revenue.
And that's really the big thing.
And that's really what makes me very optimistic.
So and what I want to say is that continue working on your software.
Think about the competitive method of the software.
The business model has nothing to do with it.
It's really the value of the software for the users.
And if they're ready to pay for it.
And sometimes you have competitors that are just better than you.
You have a proprietary competitor that are better than you.
But if you take the time and you continue to work on the software,
your software is going to get better and it's going to become the better offering.
And you can do it.
So very quickly on crypto.
So a lot of users.
So this is actually the finance of crypto.
So if you want to know more about the funding of crypto,
we have a blog post that just came out three days ago.
So there's a status of funding for that as year.
It's not too easy for crypto.
So actually, it's tricky is doing well.
Crypto is more difficult.
We're doing okay because we have funding for nine people.
We can pay them.
But we have this problem that it's mostly a project funding.
And very little kind.
And the reason is that crypto has a bit too targets.
One is individual users and individual users.
They don't have a lot of money.
They could pay a small subscription.
Five euros a month is already allowed to ask them for individual users.
And on the other side, we could have enterprises.
People very into security.
The problem is that it's a very specific market.
And it's so moving.
You need a lot of extra features for this market.
That is very specific to the security aspect.
It could also be the ministry and actually our developers are not that fund of working for the
Ministry that much more interest in working for privacy.
But so crypto has these two two use cases privacy and security.
And they're not easy to sell.
And it's also in the market of the office suite.
It's really, really hard in the office suite area to compete with Microsoft.
Everybody is struggling there to match the features that exist in the office suite.
So it's a really tough market.
But we still have the chance to have a lot of supporters and people that help you.
So we have projects.
So we have projects in France.
We have projects that was in our net.
And our net has been a huge supporter of crypto.
So if you haven't looked for an internet and NGI is a way to fund your project.
Go look for it.
It's great.
It's not difficult to make a proposal.
It doesn't take too much time.
Just show how well involved you are in the open source communities.
That's what they like.
That's what they want.
They want people.
They want to fund people that are already doing open source work.
And they will, they will be ready to fund.
For example, I saw you had a small grant.
Asked for more.
That would be my thing.
You didn't ask for for.
You could ask for more.
Yeah, maybe sometimes.
But we have the chance that they like crypto a lot.
And they even use them themselves.
So we have a good good will.
So the difficulty is that we don't have goals.
So the problem is this.
This is a recurrent revenue.
So this is what we get through subscribers on crypto.
And this is what we get in the red is the donations.
So donations is nice.
But it doesn't pay the bills.
So maybe we can do better.
So actually.
So one of the things with crypto is we do zero service.
So we have no service business model.
So we don't have these goals on service.
Because it's also much more difficult to do service.
I'm finishing.
So I mentioned NGR.
And I want to do one thing is donations.
I mentioned donations.
It's a bit tough donations.
But there are some hope.
For example, picks have failed.
Pixel fed.
They had.
I think they have 400 donations on open collective.
But they launched.
They got a big push around Instagram.
And leaving from Instagram to Pixel.
They announced a Kickstarter.
And they didn't do 55k.
They did 78k dollars.
It's just that I didn't update my slides since the time it already
grow to 78k.
So there is some hope.
With 78k of the nation, you can start to do something.
Let's let's that can.
Where can be one person.
And that starts to be something.
But with 16k of donations, you don't go very far.
And so I want to give a last throw.
Trot out to funding open source.
And we decided to give back 1% of our recurring revenue.
There are organizations like cookie public and friends that are advocating for that.
And so we have created a 1% fund inside.
And we have created a fund to give back to the project that we use.
I think that even though we do open source, we should also give back.
Because we're not the only one to have projects and need to fund them.
And we are built on top of a lot of modules.
So we were voting inside the company to give to different modules.
We've given to master it on first and on second lab.
Big Google button.
Libra office as part of that.
And things that we're using in our product.
Because we know that the block of our struggling.
And that it's not easy on the developer side.
So the open source pledge has stickers here.
And so that's actually another organization.
But I think I'm missing the thing about that.
But I think the in the US around the open source pledge.
It's more than $2 million that is going now to open source 2.5.
And so that's great.
Because it's much more as just a 67 companies.
It's actually smaller companies.
And it's like 200K that have been given out through this program.
And that's it.
And I want to give a big thanks to the team.
Because everything I showed would not happen without the team.
So I'm afraid I'm too long.
So I don't have enough time for questions.
But if you have questions, I'm outside.