Some great wisdom imparted by Shay Banon (creator of Elasticsearch).

  • Be bored. To promote innovation.
  • Open source and building a critical mass. Be committed. You need to care for it now; IRC, forums, negative feedback, bugs.
  • The benevolent dicator model (BDM) versus the democracy with a leader model.
  • Be distributed.
  • Choose a useful (and normally hard) problem to solve.
  • Best way to learn is to actually build something.
  • Double down on passion. Recruit passionate people (e.g. story about the guy who paid for Elastic training off his own back).
  • Videos are for collaboration.
  • Simple things, should be simple. Not easy though.
  • Hierarchy matters. Humans can’t make decisions in groups.
  • IT is obsessed with whats next. You only need to look backwards for answers.