Building Careers and Companies with Open Source with Miguel de Icaza

In this episode, we talk to Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer about his career building open source software, founding companies, and building communities.

[01:10] - What Miguel does at Microsoft

[04:15] - Miguel's origins in Open Source during college

[08:00] - The Birth of GNOME

[10:30] - The Birth of Mono

[12:45] - Unity and Mono

[14:38] - Forming Xamarin

[16:51] - Key Career Inflection -  Laid off from Novell, saving the team

[18:45] - Critical lesson from his first company "it's very difficult to make money selling Open Source software"

[19:42] - Deciding when to take VC money

[23:50] - How Miguel learned to run a business

[26:09] - Key Learning: Learning creativity from "The Art of Possibility" by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander

[29:00] - On Miguel's plan to undermine Microsoft :)

[29:54] - Building a spreadsheet teaches Miguel how to take on bigger challenges

[33:00] - Miguel's coaches, partners, and mentors

[34:00] - Miguel on networking and building community and the power of IRC

[39:34] - Worst career advice

[40:00] - Productivity hacks