$180k base salary is appropriate but most of those people are expecting stock options as well (compare to Levels) so the fully loaded price* is closer to 300-500k/year x 3 people, so $1-1.5mm

We’ve already done most of the conceptual and architectural work for Postgres, MySQL, and mongo (and redis but not highly available). Much of that was inspired by the Manatee project at Joyent. So (though I haven’t looked at this I a while and the DBs may have changed in a way that becomes more challenging) this is probably a case of put money in, get value out.

However I can assure you you aren’t going to get even 600k out of the community.

We worked really hard to get the first 120k and twisted a lot of wrists to get there. (Of course if you know someone who wants to write 600k checks for open source stuff please have them call me)

The 1-1.5mm number is about what a standard YC company gets at demo day. So that’s the path I’d recommend. Add in another 500k for overhead and biz dev people and that’s a pretty solid startup. Honestly if we had just focused on that we would probably have got a series A.

One of the great things about open source is that you create 100x+ the amount of value that you capture. The dark side is that no one wants to contribute cash as users to make that happen (I’m thinking more of companies than individuals - lots of individuals will give a few dollars)

So, unfortunately, and as always, it’s easier to raise VC than sponsorships for open source.

That being said I strongly encourage anyone who’s interested to pick up where we left off. Either as a community project or a funded startup this would be a huge benefit to the ecosystem.

* of course you can find people who are cheaper and passionate about the project to do it for less, maybe much less. But if someone called me and said for what price can you guarantee this could be done, I’d say 1-1.5mm USD.

Thank you very much once again for responding with this level of detail.

When you got the first 120k, who paid that? One entity or multiple?

Our strategy was to encourage developers to talk to their bosses rather than contribute individually which we think but can’t prove worked well. Basically we tried to get on calls with CTOs and CEOs and explain that this would help the company.

Did the money come from the companies' tech budgets?

Was it a one lump sum pre-payment or periodic payments? Were there any strings like deliverables attached?

Hope this is not too much to ask, I'm really interested in the process.

I am developing something almost completely the opposite -- a website platform designed only for small-scale deployments by individuals and small communities, with purposeful mechanisms to limit/control growth, and for now deliberately without any finances, fregan.

Recently I have been coming to terms with the idea that I may get a lot further if I attract outside help, but currently I don't have much to pay with, and I've not made it easy for someone to just jump in and start contributing.

I am learning a lot from your answers.

In our case the funding came prepaid with no strings attached. Can’t speak to where in their budgets the funds were allocated from.

I think we should build an ecosystem where companies support open source projects that benefit their companies with great ROI. Unfortunately I don’t know how we get there yet.

There are so many different funding models now for different things (https://humanipo.app/ for example) that there must be a good answer. We should all work together and try harder to find what the best option is.

The numbers I'm seeing on HumanIPO are not encouraging :)