Today is fundraising announcement day. As is the nature of writing for a larger audience, it is a formal, safe announcement. As it should be. Writing must necessarily become impersonal at scale. But I would like to write something personal about why I am doing this. What is the goal of building exe.dev? I am already the co-founder of one startup that is doing very well, selling a product I love as much as when I first helped design and build it.
Purpose Ventures - Purpose
Conventional VC is often at odds with the ambitions of purpose-driven entrepreneurs and their founding values and missions. These founders are interested in more than growth for growth’s sake. They want to build lasting, impactful businesses and preserve their mission in the future.
Signaling theory in entrepreneurial fundraising and crowdfunding research
Researchers often employ signaling theory to explain the effect of entrepreneurial communication on fundraising success. This focus on signaling can lead researchers to overlook alternative explana...
How To Be Successful
I’ve observed thousands of founders and thought a lot about what it takes to make a huge amount of money or to create something important. Usually, people start off wanting the former and end up...
Microsoft Build 2026: Be yourself at work - The Official Microsoft Blog
Platforms shift when developers build. We explore, choose tools, dream, create. This platform shift comes with more information than ever, ready at your fingertips. This shift, it’s about building fast AND THEN: it’s about building, operating, optimizing and observing. Securing your infrastructure, applications and agents in a seamless way that doesn’t slow you down from...
All Things Sales! 16 Mini-Lessons for Startup Founders | Andreessen Horowitz
As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partner Peter Levine is constantly asked “Why sales?” by entrepreneurs and technical founders. He himself used to hold the “engineer-centric” view that if...
Founders Hub | Transform Finance
The founder playbook for building a company that lasts and stays true to why you started it. Research, case studies, and practical tools for incorporation, fundraising terms, board structure, ownership, and culture.
How to set up a new Programme | The Commons Conservancy
So you are responsible for some ‘free and open’ project or effort that is in the public interest. This could be free software/open source, open hardware, open science, open content, etcetera. With open, we mean that you are sharing not just the final end result as something immutable, but you’ve made it part of the ‘Commons’ by explicitly allowing anyone to build and extend on what you’ve created. In legal terms this is normally done through a ’license’, and each incremental author actually needs to license his or her part. However, once different people start contributing, managing who can license what becomes cumbersome - especially if you need to make upgrades to a license. Mix in the need to collectively raise funds for promotion, development and maintenance, and you’ve just experienced why people that are involved with larger projects sometimes feel victim to their own success. None of this matters when a project is young, but as soon as it is about to outgrow the original creator it becomes urgent - there is a window of opportunity for quick and effective repair which slowly starts to close once you’ve passed a certain scale, The critical fase of scale up is where we aim to help out.
Aaron Boodman on Twitter / X
There is this tension in dev tooling right now: Lots of people want to self-host, and not depend on a service. Lots of people also want the vibes of open source - being part of an open development community, having the code, etc.But builders still need to make a living...— Aaron Boodman (@aboodman) January 23, 2024
Keep Your Friends Close — Open Tech Strategies | Blog
One of the insider secrets of free and open source software (FOSS) is that most of the rules a project uses on a day-to-day basis are not found in the software’s license. There are contribution guidelines, which are enforced by the project only taking contributions that meet them. There are codes of conduct, which are a condition of community participation. There are endorsements, official membership, a voice in setting the project roadmap, and all kinds of other benefits that attach to varying types of community participation. In each case, entirely external to the license, there are official rules and unwritten norms that govern how participants gain the benefits of joining the civic life of a project.
Build the thing you wish to see in the world
For most of my career, I've been confusing building products with building businesses—and that confusion kept me from pursuing a lot of ideas. Two weeks off helped me realize that not everything needs to be a startup, and some of the best things we build are the ones we build just because we want them to exist.
Open Sourcing our Company Handbook: read on to know why
In this post we’re explaining the reasons we decided to open s...
Building what customers need, not just what they ask for - Linear
Notes from our product team on building the tools we use every day.
The DevRel Path to Success: Awareness, Enablement, Engagement — Mary Thengvall - Community Builder
Whether you’re trying to figure out what type of Developer Relations professional to hire or trying to decide which of your team members is responsible for which tasks, having a clear framework with which to divide the responsibilities and focus our work is important. In this blogpost we’ll talk abo
Aspiration | Better Tools for a Better World
It's our 23rd Anniversary! Nonprofit staff, developers, capacity builders, and grassroots activists will convene at the 2026 Nonprofit Software Development Summit, 18-20 November, 2026, to share knowledge, build capacity, and collectively envision the future of free, open and equitable digital tools and practices to support social change efforts.
There are two questions you need to answer when building something new: who is this for, and where is the money going to come from? Some longer thoughts on my exchange with @mosh.bsky.social about the ATproto ecosystem, and its needing a business focus. numergent.com/2026-08/Project-Product-Start…
Project vs. Product, Startup vs. Business
numergent.com