August 20th, 2011FrOSCon, Bonn, Germany

Walter Heck, Tribily.com

Living the dream: running a FOSS company out of your backpack

1

Who am I?

• Walter Heck, 30 years old

• Studied IT (for 2 years)

• Narcoleptic

• Traveler / hitchhiker / couchsurfer

• Diver / Hiker / Geek / Environmentalist / Metalhead

3

Timeline

• Worked in dutch corporate world 7 years

• Gave away all my stuff, quit my job and started traveling in 2007

• Started my company in 2008 when I ran out of money

• Lived in 4 continents in 4 years in Thailand, Malaysia, Costa Rica, Brasil, Alaska and currently Turkey

4

OlinData

• Started because I didn’t want to stop traveling

• Chose MySQL because I thought it was cool and fit for location independency

• Made 2000EU in the first 8 months only (with non-mysql work)

• Started consulting through Open Query and found 2 small clients

• Started oplexing (shared webhosting for professionals) in 2009, quit it in late 2010 after never making any money

• Started tribily (server monitoring as a service) in 2010

5

What worked?

• Winging it! Just get started!

• Don’t be afraid to say goodbye to people, only work with skilled people who can work independently

• Keeping the goal (traveling while making money) in mind when making decisions

• Following my heart, not listening to what others told me from time to time

7

What worked (2)?

• Karma overrules business decisions

• Build discipline (work whenever I can)

• Persevere!

• Have benefits from being virtual: all knowledge online and transferable

• Do things the proper way, not the quick way

8

What didn’t?

• Trying to make money out of shared hosting

• Trying to hold on to something that clearly didn’t work

• Doing work remotely that wasn’t suitable for it

• Elance (ugh!)

9

Marketing

• Speaking at conferences (ok, it’s also a lot of fun ;) )

• Google SEO (Write content) (25% of all visits)

• Commenting on related blog posts (20%)

• Responding to tweets, forums etc.

• Google Search Alert

10

Finding people

• It’s hard!

• 1 good employee == 5 lousy ones

• Techies? Chat interview first!

• Personal network / references

• Low income countries

12

Why FOSS / Openness?

• Sharing is caring

• Code that needs to be open needs to be reusable (==well structured/designed?)

• Giving back to a community that gives me so much

• Hope for external contributors

13

What do we do with/for FOSS

• Using: puppet, mysql (MariaDB), zabbix, drupal, debian, php, redmine

• Sharing back: http://github.com/tribily

• Drupal to zabbix module

• Zabbix templates

• Zabbix frontend modifications

• Zabbix server binary patches

• Help out on forums, irc, mailing lists

14

Future plans

• Grow organically, no outside funding

• Employ people from low income countries with decent incomes

• Create time to work on a project that changes the world

• Move from the mysql business (non-stable income) to the tribily business (stable, not depending on amount of work)

• Settle down in a nice location on the planet with home office

• But first: travel more!

16

Dreams

• Live off the grid but still connected

• Make enough money to support employees and their families

• Rule the world…. >:)

17

Questions / Feedback ?

19

The End!

http://tribily.com walter@tribily.com

@tribily