Events and Speaking Opportunities

Looking for Speakers?

Contact me on LinkedIn if you want to book me as a speaker for your event.

These are some possible topics for talks based on the content of the book:

• Bootstrapping versus working with venture capital
• Free and open source software (legal aspects, monetization, business models,...)
• How to put a value on a start-up / scale-up (case study)
• Growing a business from start-up to exit
• Global-born companies; internationalization; cultural differences in business
• From nerd to entreprenerd; from entrepreneur to investor
• Making your start-up investor-ready; strategies for growth

I'm also interested in "meta" talks, for instance about the process of writing / self-publishing a book.

In the past, I was a speaker at events such as JavaOne / Oracle Code One (San Francisco, California), the Great Indian Developer Summit (Bengaluru, India), Devoxx (Antwerp, Belgium), SXSW (Austin, Texas), the Tech Startup Day (Brussels, Belgium), the ETDA Conference (Bangkok, Thailand), the Open Source India Days (Bengaluru, India), and The Big Squeeze (Brussels, Belgium). I was a guest lecturer at the Antwerp Management School, the University College Leuven-Limburg, and the Solvay Brussels School for Business & Economics.

I have a preference for IRL events, for which I am willing to travel. Unfortunately, those events will only be possible once the majority of the world has been vaccinated against Covid-19.

Key Figures Live Event: From Startup to Exit November 19, 2021

CIONet Summer Celebration: August 26, 2021

Leanpub Frontmatter Podcast

Listen to the 97-minute Leanpub Frontmatter podcast in which Leonard Epp interviews Bruno about his book.

Some fragments:

• I think that the people who are most successful, are usually people who are able to combine two domains. Quite often, one of these domains is Computer Science or programming - and the other one could be law, could be biology, and so on.
• If, as a company, you depend on open source software, you want someone who is dedicated to that open source, and who will be able to fix your problem. It's very hard to do that if you [the open source developer] combine [supporting your software] with your day job.
• When we looked at our own situation - my wife and I - we saw that we had always gone for control decisions, in the sense that my wife and I were the only founders, only owners: We didn't accept external capital. When we hired people, we were still the only people who were allowed to sign documents, for instance. We didn't delegate that power to other people. We noticed that our choice for control decisions had the consequence that, we had to work more than if we would be able to delegate. What was even worse, by going for control decisions —and that's explained very well in Noam Wasserman's book— by going for control decisions, we were limiting the growth potential of our company. After reading that book, we said, "What can we do to go from controlled decisions to wealth decisions?"
• When you sell your company, you have an agreement that the buyer will buy your company. But before everything is signed and closed, they do a due diligence. They look at your annual accounts and they check everything. They check everything. We knew that the first time that we did the M&A project, we wouldn't survive due diligence. We used the three years - 2014, 2015, 2016. We said, "We are going to use these three years to do a due diligence on our own company that once we sell, the due diligence will be a no-brainer, that we won't have any worries."
• The goal of the book was: "Suppose that I just graduated from college and I wanted to be an entrepreneur - a technical entrepreneur. What would be a good book to read?" That's the book that I wanted to write.

GUBERNA Director's Day

Theme: "Unlocking resilience through good governance"
Date: February 23, 2021

Open Core Summit 2020

Breakout Session: Dec 18, 2020 (7:10PM–7:40PM PT)

Other events

There's a more comprehensive list of past events on lowagie.com.

Open Source Survival — A Story from the Trenches

With this talk, I want to help open source developers by sharing my personal experiences with open source survival. I discuss eight different ways you can make money as an open source developer.

The Dark Magic of Start-Up Valuation

This is a talk about start-up valuation seen from the point of view of the founder/owner, as well as from the point of view of the investor/business angel.