Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 41Use What’s Free

Jason Seats

Jason is Chief Investment Officer at Techstars and prior to that, a managing director of the Techstars Austin and Techstars Cloud in San Antonio. He founded Slicehost, an early cloud computing hosting company, acquired by Rackspace in 2008. Slicehost became the core for the initial Cloud Servers product and Jason continued at Rackspace until 2010 as VP of Software Development, managing the cloud engineering teams.

When I started Slicehost in 2006 I was a bootstrapper to the core—not because I chose to be or because of any personality trait, but out of necessity. With no money, our choices were to build things ourselves, use what’s free, or build on top of open source. We ended up doing all three of those during the early buildout of our product. And we were able to provide service to over 15,000 customers with just eight people—mostly by using free tools.

Today, at Techstars, we still get a lot of mileage out of free tools. For example, we use Google Sheets and especially the scripting you can do on top of that. It’s infinitely extensible and completely free. Of course, we use lots of Google apps, which are also free.

I reached out to the founders on our Techstars internal founders’ forum to see what sorts of free tools they were using, since they are in the building stage. Predictably, a lot of their responses were focused on cloud-based solutions. Matt Walters, cofounder of GoChime (2011 Seattle Accelerator) uses a number of Docker products—CE ...