Episode #326 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Dries Buytaert, Founder and Project Lead of Drupal and Co-Founder, CTO, and Chief Strategy Officer of Acquia.
Many of the most successful companies in tech were created by founders who built something that was to fill their own need. This was certainly the case for Dries, who back in 2000, started an internal online message board for his friends from his dorm room in Belgium which turned into Drupal.
Fast forward to today, Drupal powers 2% of all websites in the world and over 10,000 people contribute to the Drupal open source project every year.
In addition to running one of the most successful open source projects, Dries went on to build Acquia, along with his Co-Founder & the company’s first CEO, Jay Batson and early investor - Michael Skok. Acquia’s innovative business model has been a blueprint for other open source companies.
In this episode of our podcast, we cover:
- The details of the Drupal community and what are the right ingredients for building a successful community.
- Dries’ background story growing up in Belgium, how he developed a passion for technology, and the full story of how Drupal came to fruition.
- Drupal’s growth and momentum, plus a great story of how the community stepped in to help fund this open source initiative.
- The early days of Acquia in terms of figuring out the business model and then scaling the company under Tom Erickson’s leadership.
- The current state of the state of Acquia as a Digital Experience Platform.
- Why entrepreneurship is 80% sales and marketing, even as an engineer.
- And so much more.
