Building Careers and Companies with Open Source - Miguel de Icaza's Journey

Explore the career journey of Miguel de Icaza, Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft, in this 43-minute video interview. Discover his origins in open source software during college, the birth of GNOME and Mono projects, and his experiences founding companies like Xamarin. Learn about key career inflection points, including being laid off from Novell and saving his team. Gain insights into critical business lessons, such as the challenges of monetizing open source software and deciding when to accept venture capital. Understand how Miguel learned to run a business, developed creativity, and tackled larger challenges through projects like building a spreadsheet. Explore the importance of networking, community building, and the power of IRC in his career. Hear about his coaches, partners, and mentors, as well as his thoughts on productivity hacks and career advice.

- What Miguel does at Microsoft.
- Miguel's origins in Open Source during college.
- The Birth of GNOME.
- The Birth of Mono.
- Unity and Mono.
- Forming Xamarin.
- Key Career Inflection - Laid off from Novell, saving the team.
- Critical lesson from his first company "it's very difficult to make money selling Open Source software".
- Deciding when to take VC money.
- How Miguel learned to run a business.
- Key Learning: Learning creativity from "The Art of Possibility" by Benjamin Zander and Rosamund Stone Zander.
- On Miguel's plan to undermine Microsoft :).
- Building a spreadsheet teaches Miguel how to take on bigger challenges.
- Miguel's coaches, partners, and mentors.
- Miguel on networking and building community and the power of IRC.
- Worst career advice.
- Productivity hacks.