Getting into open source

  • After Ride Health, Dax joined a Series-B startup as a director — his first full-time management role with no programming tasks. With 3–4 hours of daily meetings, he filled the rest exploring open source 13:16.
  • He found SST (a toolkit for full-stack apps on AWS, by Frank and Jay) a couple of months after launch, contributed, invested in their round, then joined a month later — they returned the investment as salary, on which he then owed taxes. His advice: "if you're going to invest in a company, make sure you're not going to join them" 14:02.

OpenNext — the project that blew them up

  • Born from a year of users nagging: people wanted help deploying Next.js on AWS. Nobody on the team wanted the work (complex framework, JS bundling internals, tedious), so "we made Frank do all of it" 14:46.
  • Design goal from day one: the project shouldn't need to exist. It filled a gap left because the Next.js team naturally focused on Vercel; the ideal end state was Vercel/Next.js absorbing it 15:15.
  • It annoyed Vercel but rallied other providers with the same problem — Cloudflare, Netlify, eventually Microsoft and Google — who built adapters. The Next.js team eventually shipped an official adapters API, the effort became collaborative, and the need for OpenNext is fading 15:38.

This "pick a temporary bad guy, galvanize their competitors" pattern becomes OpenCode's core strategic playbook — see 04 and 05.