Personal and professional updates — announcing Techpaladin Software

World Domination 4 Minutes

Today I’m going to talk about something a bit different. Maybe very different!

After six years at Blue Systems GmbH, I’ve had the privilege of working daily with some of the finest and most ethical engineers I’ve ever known; lots of people whose names you probably recognize, because they’re some of the biggest contributors to Plasma and KWin, and regularly appear in This Week in Plasma.

Starting earlier this month, about a dozen of Blue Systems’ current people — myself included — have moved over to a new company named Techpaladin Software that’s co-owned by me and someone else you probably know: David Edmundson!

No, this isn’t some kind of hostile takeover or internal corporate backstabbing. 🙂 Rather, it’s the result of a mutual decision made between the owner of Blue Systems, myself and David Edmundson, and Blue Systems’ other personnel who are moving over.

Practically nothing changes for KDE: Techpaladin will sponsor almost all of the same people Blue Systems did, and they will continue to enjoy the same wide latitude to improve KDE software for a living with a high level of personal and professional freedom. Techpaladin will be a KDE e.V. Patron, too. Keeping this transition as smooth as possible was a major goal here!

I’m incredibly grateful to Blue Systems for the personal and professional opportunities I’ve had over the past six years. Working on KDE for a living has been one of the greatest privileges I’ve ever been blessed with — undoubtedly the most satisfying years of my career, and I have Blue Systems to thank for it.

Wait what

Yeah for real! To be honest, in the beginning of this process, I was as surprised to learn about the opportunity as you may be while reading about it right now.

Now, I’ve been a business owner before, but admittedly only at a smaller scale, running a two-person 3D printer company from 2011 through 2014. In fact, some of you who were around for the early days of 3D printing and the RepRap project might remember a company bearing the similar name of “Techpaladin Printing“. That’s right, this was my company! Back then, we helped fellow community members people build MendelMax 3D printers (you can find an archived build guide of mine linked to on that page) from our parts and kits, starting with a humble order of 250 plastic Igus bushings — which at the time could only be purchased in commercial quantities, not at retail. It was my first serious exposure to FOSS (and FOSH!) principles in action, and also where I first fell in love with the movement.

Techpaladin is a much bigger business, of course — with a headcount of over a dozen spread across 7 countries and 2 continents, more complicated accounting, and a co-owner. There are a lot of moving parts; the setup process has been challenging for sure. But I think we’re up to the task!

So this is you throwing off the mask and revealing yourself as some kind of evil techbro corporate oligarch, right? I knew it!!!

And you should buy my new cryptocoin, too! 🫨

But seriously, setting up this enterprise has refocused my conviction that while organizing a business is real work that can be done well or poorly and should not be discounted, the true value in a company is generated by the workers — and those workers should be the overwhelming beneficiaries of that value. I’m still me, and my primary goal remains to propel KDE to world domination! Techpaladin is simply a new and powerful arrow in that quiver, particularly on the topic of helping people make careers out of KDE — a topic near and dear to my heart.

On a personal level, I fully intend to continue working on KDE software in my technical and organizational capacities, in addition to my new tasks managing the business. For example, you can see I’m still publishing This Week in Plasma, still doing technical work, still reviewing other people’s merge requests, and still triaging bug reports.

I’m sure I’ll make some dumb mistakes as I find my way on this journey, and be deservedly criticized for them. When that happens, I’ll try my best to learn from them and do better in the future. So thanks in advance for bearing with me!

What’s your business model?

Like Blue Systems, Techpaladin is a software consultancy, and clients can pay for work on KDE software. And we’re inheriting Blue Systems’ contract with Valve Inc. as our first client! So Techpaladin will continue to maintain and develop large amounts of KDE software relevant to the Steam Deck.

In that case, can you fix this awful bug I’m experiencing?

Why yes, as a matter of fact! If you’d like to sponsor a bug fix — or a new feature, or custom development work of any kind — do get in touch. Techpaladin draws from the same deep well of top Plasma talent that Blue Systems did.

Are you hiring?

Not at the moment. We just got started, but if things go well, we will be open to hiring! If and when that time comes, I’ll announce it publicly.

Wow, what a weird thing to happen

Isn’t it!? The world is a weird place, and if there’s anything I feel like it’s been trying to teach me over the past five months, it’s that you can’t really predict anything. I think all you can do is be flexible in the face of events, and try to make a positive difference within the sphere of what you do have influence over, so that’s what I’m aiming for here.

Thanks as always for your time, everybody, and let’s continue to propel KDE to ever greater heights together. Today I’m feeling even more optimistic that the absurd goal of getting KDE software onto every device on the planet is actually doable!

Unknown's avatar

Published by Nate

Published

20 thoughts on “Personal and professional updates — announcing Techpaladin Software”

  3. I’ll never stop being amazed how many different tasks you can take on while rocking at all of them and not having burned out a long time ago already.

    I know you guys can do this because you’ve done much of it for years already! Best of luck and business sense 🙂

    Honestly, the biggest question I’ve got after reading this is not about what Techpaladin is going to do, because based on the people and initial contract it seems very clear. But more about what role (if any) Blue Systems will still have in the community going forward. Hopefully someone who remained on the other side will blog about that too, eventually.

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. Thank you so much!

      As I’m not affiliated with Blue Systems anymore, I don’t want to put words in their mouth. Note that there’s no bad blood between Techpaladin and Blue Systems; this was a transition planned and coordinated from both sides. And I’ve still got friends and colleagues there! But I’ll let Blue Systems people take the lead on their own communication at this point.

      Liked by 2 people

  5. I expected something like this to happen.

    This makes a lot of sense.

    More responsibility on your shoulders but also more liberty.
    I trust you can operate for the years to come as Blue Systems did.

    Great on you Techpaladins for this move !

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

  9. From the KDE side of things, I think it’s an incredibly good sign that one of the major corporate drivers of its project contributions is directly owned by two folks who are already incredibly integral members of the community, engaged at the ground level in many different aspects.

    It’s basically the polar opposite of a stereotypical big-tech dynamic, where a buzzword-filled venture capitalist pushes folks to work on getting signups for some “service” that harvests users’ time and data…instead, there are folks at the helm who are real users, real developers, and real community members.

    From the Nate Graham side of things – your ability to speak clearly and directly about so many factors relevant to FOSS, from hardware partnerships to operating system design to community leadership, is ridiculously impressive. The world needs more company leaders who want to do the right thing, and have practical ideas for how to do it – you 100% fit that bill, and I hope the new enterprise ends up as everything that you hope it will be!

    Liked by 2 people

    Reply

    1. Thank you so much for the very kind words and the vote of confidence! I’d be lying if I didn’t agree with you that I think this will be really good for KDE. 🙂

      Like

    2. I’m a bit confused why I can’t reply to Nate directly, so sorry John:)

      I wanted to ask about Blue System as well, and can understand you want them to speak about it theirselves. Just asking if you could link to an answer when it appears, somewhere. Ty!

      Like

  10. Congratulations from me as well!

    Considering that the KDE community mostly has democratic and meritocratic hierarchies, I would be very interested to hear if you had considered founding, for example, a cooperative instead of a company. If you did consider it, why was a Limited Liability Company seen as the better choice here?

    I was and still am entertaining the thought to perhaps one day apply for a job at Blue Systems, well and/or TechPaladins now, I guess. 😉 Not that this is too important currently, but at least from my limited understanding of business structures, I would have preferred joining a cooperative over a company. Though I know nothing about how the legislature for cooperatives works in the US.

    And please don’t understand this as voicing distrust or criticism to you or David E. or your decisions. I am coming at this with my own background of having had to experience before how misfortune turned my life around, and me not really being able to function well as a decision-maker for a few years, so I am generically skeptical of single (or dual) points of failure which a (co-)ownership brings. I have some confidence that you and David keep being being great human beings and bosses for many decades, but if you don’t mind entertaining the thought, if your new company is hopefully very successful, what is stopping you from becoming cocain-induced worker-exploting tech bros long-term? 😈

    Like

    Reply

    1. Hi Felix!

      There’s actually no such legal structure as a “co-op” in the USA (outside of limited state-specific exceptions); rather, you generally make one of the existing entity types into a co-op by virtue of choosing its ownership structure carefully. There are two practical options for entities that do or will have non-USA owners:

      1. A corporation with workers having shares.
      2. A partnership or multi-member LLC (which is taxed as a partnership) with workers having equity/membership. In practice you would always choose a multi-member LLC due to greater liability protections.

      Both work, but the devil’s in the details. The challenge for both is how to distribute ownership if the members don’t all put in equal amounts of money. This is a major concern if the initial startup costs are extremely high. For the sake of a hypothetical, imagine that one person has $100,000 to put in, and 9 people have $100. In this contrived and silly case, either the first person gets 99.1% of the voting power and it’s economically fair but not really a co-op in spirit, or else everyone gets a 10% share and the first person can be screwed by being outvoted by others, and therefore has no incentive to risk so much of their personal funds in the first place — which is bad if the other 9 people can’t come up with the needed $100k, or can but don’t want to take the risk.

      In addition, the IRS frowns on trying to divorce the proportionality of voting power from economic contributions, except in very limited circumstances. You can get in trouble for doing it wrong or even trying. It’s a whole branch of U.S. tax law.

      So the way we’ve structured the company is as a multi-member LLC with economically proportional ownership/voting shares, an initial two members (me and David), and an internal process for those who want to buy membership to apply to do so. In this way, it can — and I hope will — become more “co-op like” over time, but without forcing anyone who doesn’t want to risk their personal funds to to so (not everyone wants to; business ownership isn’t for everyone). And in practice, we’ve been very internally transparent so far about finances, and we involve everyone in decision-making anyway.

      It’s been my firm intention to create a structure that will eventually outlive me; anything else would be unstable and vulnerable, as in the proverbial “bus factor.” That’s one of the reasons for having two internal owners, and like I said, I hope we eventually have more. But there are other concerns too: making sure that key online accounts have multiple logins or one shared login; making sure all processes are documented; and so on. I’ve spent a lot of time on these.

      But these are the early days, and everything is subject to refinement over time. If you count from the date we started operations, the business is barely one week old! We don’t have to get everything right immediately because we can improve it as needed, same as any software project! But it’s been quite a process, let me tell you.

      Sometimes conversations like these are best had in person, so feel free to hit me up at the next Akademy, or the next time we’re in the same room for some other reason!

      Like

    2. Thank you for the elaborate answer! I can see that the devil is in the details there. I am especially happy to hear that there is an internal process to buy membership. If that is handled in a way that prevents the richest/most daring people from indefinitely receiving most of the profits of the corporation, it is not that far away from how I understand cooperatives/”Genossenschaften” in Germany. I was a bit worried what it would do to KDE if there are suddenly strong hierarchies between contributors like between bosses and employees. It could be a real test for the whole KDE community if we had labour conflicts between KDE members.

      And thank you for the offer to talk about this in person. With my initial worries soothed, it’s not as pressing anymore. But I will become more interested if I ever follow through with trying/applying to work more closely with y’all.

      Liked by 1 person

  12. Congrats and wish you all success in world domination!

    BTW Blue Systems is an EU company which Techpaladin is US. Given the current bad political and economic scenario in US, do you have plans that Techpaladin and KDE in turn will not suffer any ill effect from this? I know you are from US, so obviously it makes sense though.

    Like

    Reply

    1. These are topics we definitely need to think about in this day and age.

      The biggest reason it’s a U.S. company is because a U.S. company is the kind I know how to set up and run. I’m familiar with the business climate and the tax laws, and there are no time zone or language barriers to overcome.

      But long-term, we absolutely want to be ready to move somewhere in Europe should the need arise. This is not at bad as it sounds, as the business has no real physical presence or assets; as my wife has become fond of saying, “it’s a business whose only assets are a bunch of people’s giant brains.” The fact that we moved from Germany to the USA proves that this type of mobility is feasible, so we can go in the other direction too. In the event this needs to happen, I would want it to happen as smoothly as possible, and there’s already been some internal contingency planning on the subject.

      Like

Leave a reply to alessioadamo Cancel reply