One of the co-founders of the influential startup accelerator Y Combinator once termed the struggles of entrepreneurs to launch a business the “trough of sorrow.” As he was trying to run an independent video game business, entrepreneur Ian Tien suddenly found himself waist deep in that trough.

Tien (pictured) had built his business on a messaging app that quickly went south after being acquired by a large company.

“It started crashing and losing data, and we were super-unhappy,” Tien recalled. “Rather than go to another platform, we realized we had 10 million hours of people running messaging in their own video games. Why don’t we build this ourselves?”

The result was Mattermost Inc., an open-source, online self-hosted messaging service that has attracted attention from investors and recognizable customers, such as Uber Technologies Inc., Airbus and the U.S. Department of Defense.

“It just started taking off,” said Tien, co-founder and chief executive officer of Mattermost. “We started getting these amazing enterprise customers that really saw what Mattermost was at the very beginning. It’s a collaboration platform for real-time DevOps.”

Tien spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the GitLab Commit event in San Francisco. They discussed how Mattermost leveraged privacy advantages to gain adoption and the company’s fruitful partnership with GitLab.

Open-source offers control

In contrast with cloud-based communications tools, such as Microsoft Teams or Slack, Mattermost can be installed on private servers. For highly regulated customers, such as the Department of Defense, this had immediate appeal.

“Open source lets you have that privacy and security because you control everything,” Tien explained. “We believe collaboration will go the open-source way, and the leading way to do that is through open core because you can generate a sustainable, scalable business that’s going to give enterprises the confidence to invest in the right platform.”

Mattermost can be downloaded and distributed through Omnibus GitLab, the platform’s full stack of packaged DevOps tools. Mattermost formed its partnership with GitLab in 2015 as an open-source Slack alternative.

“We started following GitLab’s footsteps,” Tien said. “We want to go from this concept of concurrent DevOps that GitLab has really championed to real-time DevOps. We want to take all of your processes that take hours and take that down to seconds.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s editorial coverage of the GitLab Commit event:

Photo: SiliconANGLE