Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #13
User led growth, milestones not weapons and chatbots that "don't suck"
Community-Led 💬 What's on the Minds of Early Adopters #13
Welcome to Community-Led. Each week we connect founders to dozens of early adopters and technology executives in fast growing startups and Fortune 500 companies. This newsletter surfaces the most interesting insights and conversations across the >1,000 members of the Decibel community every month. Let’s dive in!
One Big Trend Worth Your Time
More and more you, or more specifically, the developers in your organizations, are driving the future of software. As Jon Sakoda said recently at AWS, the rise of the user led growth movement originated with open source where users were contributors and contributors were users. These users (developers, data engineers, cyber security practitioners) are both the beneficiaries and highly valued participants in this economy.
User led growth is changing the way technology is developed and accelerating how it is adopted. Early stage, enterprise start-ups that enable your users to share, contribute and commiserate, are the beneficiaries of this community power and quickly progress to quantifiable traction and enterprise class maturity. There are several recent examples of this user led growth trend.
With a mission to empower DevOps teams with the best tools to deliver their apps simpler, safer, and faster, it is not surprising that Akuity, and its user led Argo Project, is the fastest growing Kubernetes-native project in the CNCF - other than Kubernetes itself. Cube grew to over 12,000 stars on Github while enabling users to quickly build customer facing analytics features and reporting tools on top of cloud data warehouses. Finally, with an active community of over 3,500 developers, Botpress is considered the de-facto standard platform for conversational AI.
Empowering your organization to be in a position to contribute to and efficiently adopt this user led innovation will provide your team and company a significant competitive advantage.
How Open Source Software Is Paving The Way For More Competitive Business Models
Open source is more important than ever, say developers. Here's what's driving adoption
The Watercooler: What we’re hearing in the Community
An Inside Look at Innovation
With an active community of thousands of developers, Botpress is emerging as an open source alternative to major cloud providers for conversational AI. In a recent blog, Sylvain Perron, Founder and CEO of Botpress, muses “why do chatbots suck?” and goes on to outline the four natural language processing (NLP) advances that will help chatbots live up to the hype. A toolset like Botpress can abstract the NLP side of things and provide an IDE for developers to build chatbots without hiring or learning new skills—or building the tooling they need from scratch. This can provide a series of benefits for chatbot projects:
Significantly reduced development time.
Easy upgrades to the latest NLP technologies without significant reworking.
Less effort to maintain chatbots as updates are automatic.
Best of all, developers can focus on building and improving the experience and functionality of their own software—not learning AI/ML/NLP.
The latest product offering from Botpress is OpenBook, the world’s first commercial knowledge-based natural language understanding (NLU) engine that works! OpenBook is a radically new method of creating knowledge-based, “intentless” chatbots. OpenBook is the first commercial NLU Engine that delivers high-quality responses (200%+ better than Google's Dialogflow) while drastically reducing efforts to build (40X less data required)... with zero tradeoff on predictability, transparency & control.
The impact of better, smarter, faster and easier chatbots will be huge - join the OpenBook beta program!
Wow, if the crowd at our AWS cocktail party in San Francisco was any indication, IRL is back! Thank you for joining us AND drop me a note if you will be at RSA in June.
Decibel Friends and Family Update
🎉 Congratulations…
Bo Kim joins Planview Inc. as Chief Information Officer
Chris Zell to Dell as Vice President of Cyber Operations & Analysis
Krishna Subbian moves to Twilio as Director of Software Engineering
See you next time.
Thanks for reading. This is a community that you’re always welcome to add to. If you have any feedback or know a story that’s perfect for this newsletter, please reach out. Email me at Stacey@Decibel.vc.
Stacey