Databases have always fascinated us. First, there’s sheer technical complexity required to architect these systems. Second, they’ve continued to evolve since the early days of computing to serve the needs of ever-demanding applications. 

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In recent years, one of the database companies we’ve most admired is Cockroach Labs. Founded in 2015, the company is the creator of CockroachDB, a leading cloud-native, distributed SQL database used by hundreds of companies, and was last valued at $5 billion. The Cockroach founders started with an ambitious vision: to reimagine the transactional database for a cloud-native world. But how did they get started and turn that vision into reality?

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Open from the start

One of the most pivotal decisions the Cockroach founders decided early on was to pursue an open source-based business model. At the time, many people were skeptical as to whether open-source companies could generate significant commercial revenue. It would still be several more years before a number of open-source companies went public, solidifying market confidence that going open source could indeed be a highly valuable choice. 

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The tactics that the Cockroach founders employed to successfully leverage their burgeoning open-source project — building a vibrant developer community, ensuring technical documentation and educational content were top-notch to drive self-service user adoption, and iterating on early monetization models — were also not as well-established as they are now. Today, there are more than 500 open-source contributors to CockroachDB and tens of thousands of CockroachDB clusters running across the world.

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If you are a founder committed to building an open-source company, we’d love to chat with you — email me at wei@unusual.vc. In the meantime, here are some resources we hope you find helpful:

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• How to stand out in an established open-source community
• How to pick the right GTM motion to reach $100M ARR
• The Modern GTM planner tool
• Free plan vs. free trial in PLG