Sachin Rekhi

Those who know me know that outside of software, music is a great passion of mine. But not just any music. More specifically, music from up and coming unsigned artists on YouTube. What excites me about artists at this stage is you see them acoustic and raw, often just a guitar or piano and their own vocals. By following them over time, you also watch them grow in confidence and mature over surprisingly short periods of time. Many of them go on to sign deals with record labels, put on national and international tours, and much more. One of the greatest disruptions YouTube enabled was making it possible for individuals with talent to showcase it online, gain an audience, and become successful without the traditional talent scout approach.

But there is an even more interesting trend that has emerged on YouTube in the last couple of years - that of the collaboration. It’s become popular for up and coming artists on YouTube to collaborate with other such artists on a single recording. The recordings always ends up being richer with the combination of two different artist interpretations. But equally important is the cross-pollination of audiences across both artists. Existing fans of one artist are exposed to the other artist and vice versa, significantly growing the fan base for both. It’s a win-win-win user acquisition strategy for each artist as well as their fans. I know I’ve discovered many new artists in this exact way.

I often get asked what motivates me as an entrepreneur to do what I do. For some it’s fortune, for others it’s fame. But for me, it’s this:



Seeing the positive impact the software I’ve built has on real people every day. That’s what motivates me. That’s why I do what I do!

I recently went through the thought exercise of trying to define my professional identity on the web. When thinking about the various components that make up my professional identity, I thought about it in terms of what I’d like people to know about me and what best represents myself and my work.

Given the recent acquisition of Connected by LinkedIn, I thought it would be a great time to reflect on what worked well with our technology stack as well as what I would like to improve going forward.

If you haven’t had a chance to check them out, feel free to review my previous posts where I detail our technology stack and the open source libraries we leverage. In this post I’ll jump right into our learnings.

The cost of building software products has dramatically fallen compared to a decade ago. Products that used to take millions of dollars are now being built for hundreds of thousands if not tens of thousands of dollars. Two of the most important drivers of falling costs have been open source software and cloud computing.

Yesterday I had the delightful task of rebuilding one of our production cloud images for Connected. What I realized during that process was the full extent to which we rely on open source software to build Connected. Connected wouldn't be what it is today and couldn't have been built nearly as quickly or cheaply without the incredible amount of open source used throughout the stack. I thought I'd take a moment to catalog all the open source software we use to give you a sense of just how much it has truly changed the cost of software development.