I understand if you don't want to share, but I'm curious what the compensation package looks like for a deal like this.
It's interesting because on one hand you have a lot of leverage (redis would not exist without you), but on the other hand you have none at all (redis can continue to exist without you). I wonder if the redis labs folks gave up equity, or if there is some kind of profit sharing arrangement.
This is certainly a unique business scenario, so again, I'm just curious. Totally understand if you can't tell us, but I'd be interested to hear insight on this.
Hello chatmasta, sorry, I can't share the details. Btw, yep makes sense to wonder about this since is a particular setup. Moreover Redis is BSD and not GPL which makes things more interesting. At the same time there are many projects that lost traction once the project leader decided to quit. So many variables indeed... So basically the value is given by a set of things. How important is for a company to have you on board, how important are your design decisions for the project, how strategic is that the project leader does not start another company instead of joining forces, and so forth... I think both parts are happy about the deal in this case.
Maybe all the pieces had some weight. All in all it was pretty logical, they were building a serious Redis company, I was not doing it, but was elsewhere. There was something not matching in the equation... It is logical to join forces, and it is more natural that the Redis development is sustained by the company that is focusing the most on Redis itself. So I think both Redis Labs and the Redis project itself are stronger from this simplification :-)
I don't know about the compensation, but I do know that by and large, cost of living is fairly low in Sicily, so if the compensation is good by US standards, antirez is going to be pretty comfortable.
I think antirez, when I met him virtually... 20 (?! così tanti?) years or so ago, really opened my eyes to the possibilities that the internet offered to people who do not live in an Important Place like Silicon Valley.
I would love to know the actual deal which happened however I highly doubt if he would publish it.
It is very clear to me that redis is a labor of love for antirez and money is not a driving factor anymore in his life. I am sure If it was about money, he would have started something like redis labs long time ago himself.
Personally, if I was as smart as him and created a great open source product like Redis, I would have definitely started something like Redis Labs to benefit from it financially. I am jealous of folks for whom money is not a driving factor.
It's a complex matter with different factors: for me money is important as well since I've family with two children, even if, indeed, I'm not crazy about getting as much money as possible in general. However, how good is money if you have no free time? Coding is something I can do from Sicily, but bootstrapping a company, I'm sure would require me traveling a lot more, compared to someone who is based on SF or London. So given that, as David Welton said in this thread, in Sicily is not super expansive, I tried to balance things, getting SF-style compensations while living here. This does not made me rich at all... I purchased a 350k euros house a few years ago and I'll have to pay half of it for the next years... But still, I can travel with family, go buy food without checking the price labels too much, have a small garden, and so forth. For me this was a good quality-of-life/money balance. With Redis Labs my compensation improved since Redis Labs is focused on Redis, is not just a part, so they are able to compensate me better, and this is good since I'll be able to work from home in a similar fashion.
Kudos for finding work/life balance while providing the community with, dare I say it, an essential tool a lot of us could not live without (or our lives would be much more difficult with a substandard tool in its place).
I, too, am an OSS developer who makes a living off my projects. Money is very important to me but so is my time. Like antirez, I want to focus on building the best features and products I can and not spend time looking for investment, hiring, running a company, etc. As of today, I have a one person self-funded profitable company which requires very little effort to maintain aside from periodic bookkeeping.
This business scenario is not that unusual. The package is whatever you can negotiate.
Your value as a no-longer-essential founder does not necessarily diminish once you are no longer a single-point-of-failure. Some founders are also superior community leaders. Doug Cutting (founder of Hadoop, Lucene, now at Cloudera) comes to mind.
A great loss for those of us inside the Pivotal tent. Not surprising, though, given the focus RedisLabs has on that product (which is available on Pivotal Web Services as a marketplace service[0], hint hint).
Not that Salvatore can't still come visit us for a tech talk in NYC.
Thank you Jacques, if I'll visit NYC, or you Sicily, you have a paid beer for the message queues hints, and for sure a visit from me in the Pivotal offices :-)
As a happy Redis-user, and a happy RedisLabs-customer, this is interesting.
> In order to not stop this magic from happening, and in order to have enough free time to spend with my family, during these years I made the decision of not starting a Redis company
I really applaud this decision, and I hope it continues to work that way. Sometimes when business and opensource collides it isn't always as pleasant as it could have been.
Suggestion: you might want to put terms "opensource" and "Apache license" on homepage somewhere (and a link to sources). From your comment I knew MapDB was opensource and I still spent a few minutes before finding the sources and license on github. It looks almost as if you want to stay "one-man-show". :)
> I do not mention name or url, since it feels bit like a spam.
FWIW, the culture here at HN has always been more accepting of a certain amount of self-promotion. After all, it started as "Startup News" and many of the users here are (or have been, or will be) startup founders, and everybody understands the desire / need to get the word out about your project(s).
Yeah, there's a line, and it is possible to cross it, but I don't think you'll find that people mind if you just post a link and the name of your project here and there.
Great project. I enjoyed reading over your code for Volumes and Stores. I have worked on similar things in Go to support B+Trees. Finding the right level of abstraction is difficult for those pieces and I am never sure that I have found it.
No impact, is the same setup: I'll spend the majority of my time on Redis, but with allocated bandwidth for Disque as well. After some time I may build a company about Disque perhaps, in order to scale the development process if needed. Thanks for asking this question.
That project was short but intense! I spent just a couple of weeks on it in a very focused way, and then just did very small updates. I wish I had more time to hack on those stuff... Fortunately there is an actively developed fork.
However it's more crowded and expensive than many cities without any of the benefits of living in a proper city. The housing and services are throttled despite an ever increasing demand of more tech workers arriving. Prices go up and quality of life goes down.
It's interesting because on one hand you have a lot of leverage (redis would not exist without you), but on the other hand you have none at all (redis can continue to exist without you). I wonder if the redis labs folks gave up equity, or if there is some kind of profit sharing arrangement.
This is certainly a unique business scenario, so again, I'm just curious. Totally understand if you can't tell us, but I'd be interested to hear insight on this.