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# Lessons from 20 Years of Bootstrapping an Open Source Business to $50M+


- **Event:** World Congress 2026 North America

## Description

Building a successful open source company without venture capital is rare - scaling it past $50M in revenue is even rarer. This talk distills two decades of hands-on experience growing and sustaining a commercial open source business from zero to global scale.
We will share the real strategies that worked - navigating product-market fit, monetizing open source while keeping the core free, building a distributed team long before remote work was mainstream, and developing a repeatable go-to-market engine without external funding. We’ll also explore what didn’t work, the pitfalls we hit along the way, and the lessons learned from building a business that competed against well-funded alternatives.
Whether you’re a founder, engineer, community leader, or simply curious about the business side of open source, you’ll walk away with practical insights, battle-tested frameworks, and a clearer understanding of how to build and scale an open source company the hard way - by bootstrapping.


## Speaker

### [Peter Farkas](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/@peter-farkas-2)

Percona, Founder


## Related talks at this congress

- [Culture Doesn't Scale Itself: Leading Engineering Teams Through Hypergrowth and the AI Transition](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1411-culture-doesn-t) — Thanos Baskous
- [On the Public Clock: Open-Source Defense When You're Not in the Club](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1683-on-the-public-clock) — Nicholas Muy
- [Honey, look! I vibe-coded an OS!](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1706-honey-look-i-vibe) — Ian Smith
- [It’s Alive! Taming the MLOps Franken-Stack: Write, Run, and Serve with Michelangelo](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/events/world-congress-2026-north-america/sessions/1675-it-s-alive-taming) — Eric Wang, Paul Zimmerman

## Watch remotely

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- All full videos, bookmarks, and playlists
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[See pricing](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/pricing)

## Links

- [Get tickets](https://www.wearedevelopers.com/world-congress-north-america/tickets)