On joining Stirling PDF as CEO

‍When I met Anthony Stirling, I knew right away that I wanted to work with him. We were introduced by Open Core Ventures, who I’d worked with closely before. Despite being half a world apart - me in San Francisco and Anthony in the UK - we immediately hit it off.

Looking back on our initial conversations, three things stood out clearly:

1. Anthony's thoughtful approach to building an open-source product;

2. the enthusiasm from the community, reflected in more than 10 million downloads; and

3. our alignment around how to grow the business sustainably.‍

Since Anthony had just launched the company with Open Core Ventures in July, it was still in the early stages of shifting from a side project into a true business. With that shift came the opportunity and the challenge to build a category-defining open-core company from the ground up. That’s exactly the kind of challenge that drew me in.

To put it bluntly, building a business around open-source software is hard. Most users will never pay for it. In fact, that’s often why they choose it over more functional alternatives. But without paying customers you have a passion project, not a business.‍

This is the problem the open-core model was designed to solve: it protects the open-source project by focusing on organizations that are willing to pay for professional features. The "core" features remain free and open source forever. Then as the company grows, it continually invests in maintaining and improving its open source software using the profit it makes from professional users and large organizations.‍

Looking ahead, my primary goal is to build Stirling PDF into a sustainable open-core business, balancing our vibrant open-source community with thoughtfully designed, enterprise-grade features. We’re committed to deepening our open-source offering, while adding new tools and automation to help customers adopt Stirling PDF at scale. I’ve already had the chance to speak with dozens of users around the world, and it’s clear that Stirling PDF is poised to lead the next generation of PDF software.‍

Please don’t hesitate to reach out, as your feedback will be enormously valuable as we grow. I'm looking forward to connecting with many more of you soon.