In open source, you really have to be near the watershed to have an impact on the source code. Customers want to be near the key contributors to the code, not a level removed.

We approached Yahoo and Jerry Yang and said that Hadoop is going to continue to be popular, and as it does, more and more of your team is going to get poached by other companies and come under pressure to leave. This way, you can control your own fate and destiny.

The rise of Twitter defined 2011. Once every 5-7 years, a company emerges that changes not just the technology industry, but the world... after what some viewed as a rocky start, in 2011 Twitter broke through into the elite group of companies that profoundly shape our world.

Bailing on a company is just something you don't do.

In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

If you don't have the best product, you're not going to make it in open-source.