Ben and Cassidy chat with Ian Tien, CEO and cofounder, and Corey Hulen, CTO and cofounder of Mattermost, an open-source platform for developer collaboration. They discuss how Ian arrived at computer programming under duress, the relationship between game companies and SaaS companies, the challenges of monetizing open-source projects, and why “software is adopted, not sold.”
Episode notes:
Ian and Corey met at Microsoft, where they built Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager 2005 (which boasted its own CD-ROM).
They went on to found Mattermost in 2016 to give developers one platform for collaborating across tools and teams.
Ian, who previously founded the game company SpinPunch, calls Mattermost “yet another of those video game companies turned B2B software companies,” like Slack and Discord. Says Ian: “Games are all the risk of a movie plus all the complexity of a B2B SaaS product.”
Today’s Lifeboat badge goes to user Diogo for their answer to How can I call functions from one .cpp file in another .cpp file?.
Connect with Ian on LinkedIn.
Connect with Corey on LinkedIn.