Eric Berry started Code Sponsor a year ago because of his passion for finding ways to sustain and fund open source developers. He ultimately had to shutdown due to potential legal issues with GitHub, but was given new life as CodeFund when he went to work for ConsenSys and Gitcoin. We talked through the backstory of this idea, why heâs so passionate about funding open source, ethical advertising, being unapologetically focused on your mission, the value of honesty and openness, and the future direction of CodeFund.
Matched from the episode's transcript đ
Eric Berry: But I wasnât. I wasnât because it didnât make sense to completely shut it off. I did shut down the platform, I stopped tracking⌠But I still had developers who trusted me and relied on me to help them get funding. And I had a good friend, Mike Smith, who I believe you know, over at Rollbar, whoâs now at GitPrime. I asked him, I said âAre you willing to stick with me? What I can do is you keep providing funding for all of these top-performing sitesâ â and he looks at them as top-performing, I look at them as needing the most funding. I said âWill you continue to provide funding for them, and I will just take a 15% cut, and that will essentially make it so that we can still do the trackingâ, as we were still running it through a tracker⌠But I didnât need any of the money. The money was literally just to help the server run. He said, âAbsolutely.â He had no issue with that.
So in December I paid out all the remaining money to all of the people that I owed money to, which came to almost $5,000, and then I had an extra thousand dollars of nickles and dimes for all of the other developers that didnât make enough money to receive that payout, so I made a lump sum donation of $1,000 to the A21 organization for fighting human trafficking. Thereâs a blog post listing every single developer that participated as a donor in that donation⌠Because it wasnât my money; I didnât consider it my money and I didnât want it. So in December I talked to a buddy of mine named Freddie Shelton, and I asked him, I said âHey, are you interested in Code Sponsor? Iâve got all these contracts set up, Iâve got Mike here⌠Would you like to take it over?â âSure, absolutely.â So he did, and he kept it going for a month, all the way through early January.
In that time, I was kind of going through this point in my life where I hate my job, I need to find purpose⌠I found true purpose in funding open source, but I need to be able to go somewhere that I can do that and get paid for it⌠And thatâs what I did.
[36:15] Over the course of about three months, Iâve been talking to Kevin Owocki, who is the CEO and founder of Gitcoin. Gitcoin is a product that helps developers get paid to contribute to open source funding through bounties. We became friends over the months and he offered me a job to come work at Gitcoin, which I accepted.
Once I got to Gitcoin, I thought âI wonder if I can just pick up where I left off and bring Code Sponsor back in.â So I reached out to Freddie, I said âHowâs it going?â, I said âWould you be willing to sell me back the company?â and he did. I gave him some money for the company, and then I brought it in as just my contribution to Gitcoin⌠Just âHereâs me, hereâs what I can bring to the table. I donât want any money for it.â They paid a few of the expenses that I had for the product, but all in all it was like âCode Sponsor joins Gitcoin as sister companies, but theyâre basically one company nowâ, because weâre all getting our paychecks from the same company, and all that stuff. But my role at that point became âMake this work. Help people through ethical advertising.â
