Founders Talk: Startups, CEOs, Leadership
Making an open source Stripe for time
· Summarized
Key takeaways
- Open source can drive rapid innovation, community engagement, and long-term trust in software products.
- Cal.com aims to connect a billion people via scheduling technology by 2031, leveraging open source, global community, and new tech like Web3.
- Focusing on bookings rather than revenue or traditional metrics aligns with their mission to facilitate human connections at scale.
- Web3 integrations, NFTs, and tokens are being explored as future access controls, representing innovative directions for scheduling and identity verification.
- Community-first approaches and asynchronous remote work are core to Cal.com’s operational and product development strategies.
- Cal.com’s open core model, with free community contributions and paid enterprise options, enables fast iteration and security compared to closed-source competitors.
- Long-term vision includes going public, sustaining open source, and building tools that support millions of marketplaces, professional services, and decentralized organizations.
Summary
Building the Open Source Timeline and Calendar Market
The episode begins with Pierre Richardson discussing Cal.com's origin as an open-source project aimed at creating an open alternative to proprietary scheduling solutions like Calendly. He emphasizes community-driven development, rapid innovation, and the importance of open source for trust and longevity. Pierre highlights how their approach allows for faster iteration and community feedback, enabling them to quickly implement new features and maintain high security standards far beyond what typical SaaS companies can achieve.
Vision to Connect 8 Billion People by 2031
Pierre explains their ambitious goal to connect 8 billion people through calendar scheduling by 2031. Using metrics like bookings and community engagement, they justify this target as a reflection of their focus on facilitating human connections. The discussion reveals their long-term perspective on building technology that is accessible, open, and scalable worldwide, aiming to serve as the backbone for countless personal and professional interactions.
Innovations in Scheduling and Web3 Integration
The podcast delves into innovative features Cal.com is developing, including recent Web3 integrations that utilize NFTs and tokens to verify access to scheduled meetings. Pierre describes how this could be a game-changer for decentralized organizations, memberships, and exclusive access use cases. He emphasizes their strategy of early adoption and experimentation with new technologies, viewing them as R&D investments that could define future standards for scheduling.
Community-First Philosophy and Operational Strategies
Pierre highlights the importance of community in Cal.com’s growth. From early community engagement via Slack and open contributions, to respecting their customer base as a kind of decentralized board, community feedback guides product decisions. The operational setup is fully remote and asynchronous, with a strong focus on developer collaboration, quick iteration, and responsiveness to user needs, ensuring they stay innovative and customer-oriented.
Market Position, Competition, and Future Outlook
The discussion covers their positioning against incumbents like Calendly, emphasizing their open-source advantage, faster pace of innovation, and flexibility for enterprise and marketplaces. Pierre shares their revenue model based on bookings, their funding history—recently raising $7.4 million—and their goal to eventually go public. He stresses that their focus remains on growth, technology, and community engagement over short-term profit, with visions of expanding their ecosystem and becoming a foundational web infrastructure for scheduling.
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Show notes
This week Peer Richelsen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Cal.com, joins the show to talk about building the "Stripe for Time" — with a grand mission to connect a billion people by 2031 through calendar scheduling. Cal has grown from an open-source side project to one of the fastest-growing commercial open source companies. We get into all the details — what it means to be an open source Calendly alternative, how they quantify connecting a Billion people by 2031, where there’s room for innovation in the scheduling space, and why being community first is part of their secret sauce.
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