High conviction bet on open sourcing Skyvern

Back in February.. I did my first podcast appearance ever with Mike Bifulco

We had just decided we were going to open source.. but hadn't pulled the trigger yet

It's crazy to watch it back and realize how big of a bet we were making. We had no idea whether the bet would pan out, but we had high conviction on 3 things:

1. Skyvern was a "cool" product. Each successful run made me go "holy shit" (I won't talk about the failed runs 😂). This magic deserved to be made open and shared with the world

2. We were struggling with differentiation. Browser automation was (and still is) a relatively crowded market. How do we differentiate? We went from being just another browser automation company, to the first open source browser automation tool

3. We had a hunch that people would want a solution that's model agnostic --> we had no idea how voracious the open source community was for open access to things that Anthropic and OpenAI control

Beyond that, we had a few "dream" outcomes happening from open sourcing. We had no expectation this would happen.. but it would be pretty cool if it did

1. We knew that expanding coverage of the web was going to be an ongoing problem. Our dream was to get open source contributions to help us along. Outcome? Skyvern's iframe support was built by an open source contributor

2. We knew that certain companies (largely health tech) would want to self-host Skyvern. This ended up being a big selling point to large enterprises.. not because they wanted to self-host, but open source reduced their risk of working with a startup

3. We knew that certain users would be cost sensitive (would not want to pay our SaaS fee). We could just point them to our open source repo and say "you can run this for free". Users like this are notorously bad customers as they can pull startups in the wrong directions.. but this created a way for both parties to be happy.

Just a cool 9 months later.. here we are. Everything I shared in the podcast + wrote in a pre-mortem document came true.. and more. Open sourcing helped us prove the market out, generate a ton of hype, and even got us some of our favourite customers.

❤️