January 8, 2025

Lessons Learned Over 10 Years of Bootstrapping Petabridge

How I've stayed sane running a bootstrapped open source software business for 10 years.

As of Monday this week, my company Petabridge turns 10 years old. I’ve been my own boss for longer, but my tenure at Petabridge is nearly 5x my tenure at every other company I’ve founded and at every place I’ve worked.

When you set out on a new venture, rarely do you expect things to go this well or last this long - so I decided to take some time to cobble together 10 lessons that have kept me sane throughout my entire odyssey with Petabridge.

I’m teaching myself some new tricks, practicing that “creative disruption” / “creative destruction” I talk about in the video - hence why we’re doing today’s post in video format.

For those of you who are not inclined to watch the video, the lessons:

  1. Enjoy building for its own sake
  2. You can’t take things personally
  3. No one is going to thank you
  4. Be ok with saying “no” regularly
  5. Automate everything you do periodically
  6. Don’t worry about what others are doing
  7. You will never get it all done
  8. Practice creative disruption periodically
  9. Actively seek negative feedback
  10. Celebrate your successes, briefly

Discussion, links, and tweets

I'm the CTO and founder of Petabridge, where I'm making distributed programming for .NET developers easy by working on Akka.NET, Phobos, and more..