By Birk Jernström

Today, I'm honoured to announce that Mitchell Hashimoto is joining Polar as an advisor! In this post, I want to share why I'm personally so excited to work with him on our mission to get developers paid to code on their passions.

I can clearly remember trying Vagrant for the first time back in 2012. For years, I had endured waiting on-, fighting with- and manually provisioning countless VMs with VirtualBox on a regular basis. Running Vagrant felt like magic in comparison and was such an incredible upgrade.

It was also built open source with a real company behind it: HashiCorp. I was in awe.

Back in 2012, I only knew of a handful successful open source companies, e.g Red Hat, Canonical, MySQL to name a few. Unlike a lot of other tech unicorns they felt real in the mythical sense of the word – an unattainable dream.

Since then, HashiCorp along with GitLab, Grafana, Elastic, Sentry and many others have proven that MySQL was not a fluke - these business models are viable. Attracting more venture capital and inspiring countless new businesses to be built source available, open core to fully open source.

It's how markets evolve.

1. Initial pioneers create the seedling of a market
2. Venture capital is attracted and more whales emerge
3. Market size & participation increases and a long-tail grows (Independent individuals & SMBs)

I believe we're now at the beginning of the third chapter.

From independent open source businesses being built like TypeSense to individual maintainers experimenting with additional offerings and models, e.g Caleb Porzio with sponsorware. Or new tools emerging to streamline donations and sponsorship towards dependencies, and more...

Our focus at Polar is to build the best funding and monetization platform for open source- and indie developers seeking to make their passion projects sustainable to independently profitable.

I'm immensely inspired by Mitchell and his contributions to open source. Few people have such vast first-hand experience building both for sustainability & profitability. From having built an open source passion project into a publicly traded business -- and the positive ripple effects it has had on the ecosystem. To now building Ghostty in public with the intent to open source it and become sustainable for the community.

So naturally, a few months ago when someone asked me: "Who would you personally love to see use Polar?" I instantly said: Mitchell Hashimoto for his Ghostty project. True story – no marketing stunt.

I had even prepared a viable path to get an introduction. Just this one key feature and then I'll reach out... Mitchell beat me to it by signing up one day out of the blue. I immediately reached out to him and we had a great chat followed by an ongoing email exchange collaborating on some exciting ideas for the future.

From our very first conversation, Mitchell has been genuinely invested in our mission and product combined with being a treasure trove of great feedback and ideas. So I'm thrilled he accepted a more formal role in the Polar journey and can't wait to work with him on the future of Polar.

Welcome to the team Mitchell!