Building a $7m non-profit tech company - John O'Nolan

John O’Nolan is the founder of Ghost, an independent publishing platform. John sees Ghost as an experiment in doing the opposite of what every other tech company does. They haven’t raised VC, instead setting Ghost up as a non-profit that can never be bought or sold. The core product is open source, with a simple SaaS model to fund future development. John is opinionated and outspoken but with many views that are hard to argue, so I can’t wait to dive into some of those today.

Timestamps

• 00:00 Intro
• 00:48 From music to software
• 01:50 The benefits of anonymity
• 06:44 Launching Ghost as a non-profit
• 14:26 Why launch on Kickstarter
• 19:12 Is the longevity of blogging susprising?
• 22:25 What companies is venture capital right for?
• 23:40 Should more companies follow the non profit model?
• 25:50 John's approach to making great products
• 27:45 How John views competition
• 29:41 How do they ship at Ghost
• 36:38 The fediverse and ActivityPub
• 42:15 John's favourite newsletters
• 43:41 John's hobbies

As always thanks for being a listener of the Make Lemonade show. Hosted by @jrfarr & @jmckinven— brought to you by LemonSqueezy.com. 

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