ubuntu
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Mark Shuttleworth and the expensive art of giving things away
A software sale bought him a seat on a Soyuz. Ubuntu gave the Canonical founder a more stubborn problem: making something free that could keep paying its way.
Benjamin Humphrey and the three-month wait for a two-week answer
A diary study gave the Dovetail co-founder a problem worth leaving Atlassian for. Years later, he is still working on the same question: how do you get what customers know into the hands of people building things?
Canonical gave away Ubuntu. Then it found the paying customer.
The company behind Ubuntu chased a phone that never shipped. Its more durable business is keeping other people’s open-source software running - from 5G networks to space-mission infrastructure.
David Siegel
David Siegel is the co-founder and CEO of Glide, the no-code platform that turns spreadsheets into working apps and, more recently, the first AI app generator. A designer and engineer who spent his early career building developer tools at Canonical, Xamarin, and Microsoft, he coined the term 'papercut' for small overlooked bugs in Ubuntu and created quicktype, one of the most widely used code generators before GitHub Copilot. He founded Glide in 2018 with three Xamarin colleagues after a stint at Microsoft, went through Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch, and has raised roughly $23.7M to make building software as easy as editing a spreadsheet.