I (personally) think the value towards openness of platform and source is rooted in the fact that a lot of inbound leads come from direct recommendations from independent developers that work for the companies looking to buy. In other words, the weekend hacker/home automation geek gets their company to use the enterprise offering of the ecosystem or platform they discovered.
Additionally, as a new company, it’s hard to convince someone that you will be around for the 5 years of a contract term when you’re not even 5 years old yet. Having a lot of your stuff open source gives them the off-ramp they would need to feel comfortable signing a deal with a younger company.
This works as long as the value you bring is with the team and a breadth of knowledge and experience behind it along with the incentives to continue to improve upon the product. Considering the amount of IoT devices there are and how much of it lacks interoperability, I’d say there’s plenty of value to be sold yet.
Early in the Seam journey, Dawn and I got a chance to speak with Jeff Lawson at Twilio. Jeff mentioned that exact dynamic, "the dev who's hacking on the weekend with Twilio and brings into work Monday morning" was a pretty powerful GTM force for them. But I don't think anyone would describe Twilio as open source. So being open-source doesn't appear to be a necessary condition for this dynamic to take place. What Jeff insisted on was the need for solid overlap between "i'm hacking with this API" and "i could use this for a business use case." That is, make the API product dead simple to get started with, and make sure it's easy to grasp how you could use this in a business context.
With respect to having an off-ramp by being open-source, I definitely agree that it does the psychological trick to convince a buyer. But in practically, most corporate-led open source projects are pretty hard to run end-to-end on your own infra. They also have limited outside contributors that really know how the stuff works.
With respect to Seam, I'd say being open-source wouldn't really move the needle for us in conversations with large enterprise customers. They're generally more interested in how much funding we have, how much runway that buys us, and how we're trending as far as building a sustainable business on which they will depend. Their tolerance for risk related to these questions is inversely proportional to their size. I suppose this is also why, in infrastructure sales, your next customer won't be significantly larger than the last one you closed.
Additionally, as a new company, it’s hard to convince someone that you will be around for the 5 years of a contract term when you’re not even 5 years old yet. Having a lot of your stuff open source gives them the off-ramp they would need to feel comfortable signing a deal with a younger company.
This works as long as the value you bring is with the team and a breadth of knowledge and experience behind it along with the incentives to continue to improve upon the product. Considering the amount of IoT devices there are and how much of it lacks interoperability, I’d say there’s plenty of value to be sold yet.